_____ _______ _______ ___ _ _ _ __ __ |_ _| ____\ \/ /_ _| / _ \| \ | | | \ \ / / | | | _| \ / | | | | | | \| | | \ V / | | | |___ / \ | | | |_| | |\ | |___| | |_| |_____/_/\_\ |_| \___/|_| \_|_____|_| Whilst browsing lobste.rs for tidbits of computing weirdness the other day I encountered https://gemini.circumlunar.space and was quite taken with the idea of a web that *could* deliver all the conveniences of modern computing without having to trust myself not to get hot and bothered by the distractions and irritations. If you know yourself, you'll learn that there are things you can't be trusted with, and the modern web triggers my ire, and my ire doesn't come across as charmingly self-effacing as I'd like to convince myself it does ;) As for many people however, that quiet meditative moment of "I'll carve out some time to just sit and explore the internet like in the days of olde" doesn't tend to volunteer itself quite as loudly as the pressures of daily life and work in this, the year of our Lord Covid-19: 2020. Luckily for me, Burnout had reared his ugly head (he looks just like me but keeps ranting about "risk metrics") so it was time to go on a vacation to the middle of nowhere. Needless to say (or I'd have nothing to write about and a thousand yard stare), I found myself some quiet moments, and whilst on previous visits to our remote location I had very little signal for internet, my phone claimed to still have 4G. I decided if I didn't use the bandwidth I could reasonably accuse it of lying and embarked on some Low Bandwidth Cosplay and restricted myself to terminal apps anyway. My first stop was to reread the intro to Gemini on https://gemini.circumlunar.space and test out a couple of the clients with `ssh kiosk@gemini.circumlunar.space`. Amfora struck me as being very pretty so I went with that, installed it locally and started looking through the "List of Known Gemini Sites". It wasn't long before I stumbled on the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic. As part of the "wider circumlunar space" it's a small VPS offering asylum to whatever kind of weirdo might come by, and it occurred to me that rather than attempting to do this gemini thing as an unafilliated lone actor, (the way I always do), I could actually engage with a community. I sent off an email to the admin with my public key and within an hour I had access. Very quickly I was living a remeniscence of my early days of shared unix systems - notably my early shell accounts provisioned by friends on IRC so that I could leave `irssi` idling in a `screen` session over `ssh` like one of the cool kids. It's completely different now. I idle on IRC via `weechat` in a `tmux` session over `mosh`. Most of my memories of those servers concern either playing around with my first piece of non-geocities webspace, and feeling like a boss now that I had scrollback the COOL way (I've still never run a bouncer for myself). More recent (but still distant) memories were of an IRC friend (who is now a coworker hilariously enough) attempting to teach me how to use git over a shared `screen` session and confusing the matter by showing me how I could add OO to my Perl by installing Moose... My university days were underwhelming, what can I say?. Anyway, enough reminiscing. Back to now. These smaller pubnixes focus on keeping things intentionally small - with limited resources, but more importantly limited membership and limited federation. From circumlunar.space you can mail to other people in circumlunar.space, but outside of that there's limited email forwarding to people like SDF. The IRC server, for example, is shared between two instances, as is the BBS system. It's slow, but not in the processing sense as everyone keeps in their lane and enjoys curating a use of minimal and performant software. Slow in that there aren't a whole bunch of updates in rapid succession. This leaves more room to engage by creating - actually having something constructive to share that *you* wrote or developed or hacked together. Just today I finally learned how to use `ed` by following another member's tutorials on their gopherspace. I wrote my own little tutorial on setting up `amfora` gemini browser with the `agena` gopher proxy so you can browse both `gemini://` urls and `gopher://` urls. I even ended up "contributing code" to `amfora` (the air-quotes are because I technically added the feature of being able to bookmark non-gemini URLs by deleting 5ish lines of code). There's something very considered and purposeful about the minimalism of the entire approach that's lead to me looking at my own setup again. I cut my teeth on `vim`, but I've been an `emacs` user with `evil-mode` (basically with `vim` modal editing and keybindings) but I'd come to realise that where `emacs` attempts to do *everything* in elisp through installed packages rather than piping output to external processes, it implements far too much and tends to be fragile when upgrading packages because of unforseen knock-on effects and dependencies. It's a nest of complexity. I started using `vim` (okay technically Neovim) again from scratch with a focus on very limited plugins, relying on external tools more and writing very simple functionality like trailing whitespace detection myself. I moved my note-taking and TODO lists from the ultra-heavyweight `org-mode` into markdown with some extra hand-hacked bits of syntax highlighting and keybindings for marking off items. It's very cathartic to strip everything back again, because everything feels very intentional and focussed, and that's something which has changed about the way we spend our time in the age of social media. The modern era of targeted advertising relies on people not already having a firm idea of their intent or their next action, and it subverts that by nudging them towards certain paths of activity. Text-only feels like a opt-out. Interestingly, back when I first joined Facebook (don't worry, I left it again) all status updates were in the present tense in that they were prefixed with " is...>" and you'd fill in the blanks with what you are or what you're doing. Multi-user systems have long had the command `finger` and if you `finger username` it will tell you about that person and tell you what's in their `~/.plan` file... About what you *intend* to do. But anyway, who cares about that Web 2.0 social media shit enough to even bother complaining about it on gopher or gemini? Heck, I'd talk about the fediverse here but even *that* is a pretty mammoth (pun intended) can of worms. Whilst I didn't want this to be too much of a love song to a text-only life, more of a subjective experience, it wouldn't be much of a subjective experience if I didn't admit that I'm pretty bowled over to be part of a number of small communities that don't need or want to grow, and that curating that presence is almost meditative in reminding me what is and isn't worth the effort. For my parting shot, a quote: "If you wanna be a big cop in a little town, fuck off up the model village." The idea of being a big deal in a small community is often sneered at, but the way I see it the only way you can really make the world a better place to be is to start small and start at home. Find a community with focus and constraints, and be creative in it. Fuck off up the model village with your head held high wielding a monospace font and a punk ethos. gemini://republic.circumlunar.space/users/grimmware/articles/text-only.txt

-- Leo's gemini proxy

-- Connecting to republic.circumlunar.space:1965...

-- Connected

-- Sending request

-- Meta line: 20 text/plain; charset=utf-8

-- Response ended

-- Page fetched on Sat May 18 14:27:45 2024