like a hockey stick at a baseball game
I check Mastodon. Sometimes. Via RSS. I see people (are now) Boosting journalists who joined up. Tech journos, usually (as I follow tech-centric accts on Masto (via RSS)). And it's so fun/cute when it's a reporter who treats the Big Elephant like it's the Blue Bird.
Like, "here's a news story, here's my take on it, et al", and, who wants/needs that anymore. I was on Twitter for a decade (hated it), and I saw, read (hell, even Retweeted) so and so's stories and "oPINES", etc. when I found them of "intellectual integrity" (as if any of that shit mattered), which from a utilitarian perspective makes sense over THERE and THEN (on Twitter, nearly a decade ago), as it was tens of thousands of followers a reporter may have, and MANY news-obsessed randoms wanting to see "what's happening". But now, it's a smidgen of followers on an alternative social media service, which is not monetized, that people (most on Masto, I assume) are using to GET AWAY from Twitter and the (ilk) folks on there.
So, it's a hockey stick at a baseball game. People wanna gather and "social" around on the Internet, quaintly sipping lemonade with colleagues on Mastodon, and someone shows up with a hockey stick, head-busting vigor in their eyes.
Shoo! Be away, we have our fun here.
and so on
It's taken a while, but I'm currently danged happy in gemini links to reliably active endpoints that branch out to even more.
But, gosh, there were a ton of servers no longer operating, other forms of broken links, expired certificates, blah blah: enough of that in succession to have me wondering what drain my life was swirling down into.
Then I somehow started lucking into sufficient mass of growing/evolving quality referencing to more of the same. I'm suddenly back to not having nearly enough time to plow through the tip of said iceberg. Damn, there are some wonderful writers out there in the geminiverse!
Of course, that soon had me thinking, "Well, what about *you*, inquiry? You gonna just sit there burping up by products of word digestion, or are you gonna concoct a bit of cuisine too?"
Well, I did have a couple gemini capsules going last fall, but succumbed to "nobody's reading this shit anyway", and deleted all content within.
But maybe I was being hasty. Or ridiculously narcissistic?
And yet I still can't help but wonder the point of putting things online instead of in notebooks or on 3x5 cards if nobody's gonna read and respond anyway.
Must be that kwazy intarweb hope of days long gone by. I guess I still believe. Or still wanna believe.
Yea, I don't "believe" much IN the WWW anymore, as far as I just *assume* it will be as-is, not much to be altered/changed about it. A lot of trends (both in business and culture) over 30+ years, and what happened happened. Now, AI seems to be all the fluster muster, and I will see/hear about it...forever, but I am taking the high/low road that I wish I had taken in the 90s with the Web - abstinence.
My late-Father was averse to the Internet, and that was likely the greatest trait I envied/wished to duplicate with our relationship - blissful ignorance. I was all in with the Web by the 90s (still am), but "i WaS yOuNg" as the excuse goes, now as I am older/wiser (laugh, cough) I have a clear and present choice to NOT jump in with AI. There's pros/cons with any big change in the world (think, airline crashes, ships sinking, et al), but as is the case with the Web, a lot of it didn't prove fruitful for what could/should have been done. Solving world hunger, sheltering the homeless, hell, just making a longterm uptick in salary jobs - all unattainable with the Web (as it has incidentally proven).
With AI, same bit. Promises of grandeur and delusions of perfection, boiled down to a cluster of centralized services/co's, and it (AI) will be as impactful AS the Web, and likewise just as useless.
Either way, I'm tossing the hat, waving the flag, and will concentrate on me. Because AI and eb's and flow's of the Web will tick on without me, and I *personally* derive near nothing from it.
Hope you're good, Inquiry.
later :)
Way too much of society has become how I viewed "fundamentalist Christianity" in the 1980's: people self-righteously foaming at the mouth - if not hating on each other - for possessing what they believe to be a superior moral compass. These days, its political parties, Race-ianity, Gender-ianity. I can imagine AI resulting in varieties of cults depending on the depth of stupidity of adherents with respect to how AI *actually* works.
My eye-rolling muscles will without question be the strongest at time of death....
I like this subject line...
inquiry, I don't know about the whole gemini-as-blogging pattern, and waiting for readers to reply... seems to me like more trying to replicate the web. Or the old web.
I want to advocate for going deeper into pub-nix systems, with their internal bulletin board systems or internal irc or whatever they offer inside. It's so far underneath the surface web that no one can see it. And maybe that's what makes it good. So warm and hidden. That's where I found some online community to contribute and share into, to the extent I'm able. It can be cold and mean and insane out on the surface of the web or even gemini, lots of shadowy abandoned houses as you wrote, and I'm not sure I want to go back out there any more.
you dug beneath the web, you dug into gemini, and you can dig down another layer into a pubnix computer, and then I'll see you there.
I hope you're as well as you can be.
J.
Thank you, joneworlds.
Sniffed around a bit. Didn't find a lot on what you referred to as a "pubnix computer", but it seems in the direction of the so-called "local bbs" environments one would take turns calling/modeming into, which I was quite fond up late 1980's / early 1990's.
Have you a link or two to reasonably robust examples of such to share? Or are they intentionally made difficult to find? All I've found so far is:
=>
https://heathens.club/ Heathens dot club
but that seems little more than a test, links therein going kind of round and round.
The software is:
=>
https://github.com/tbal999/bb bb for LINUX
gemini://textmonger.pollux.casa/
inquiry, it's possible I use the wrong words. I see people refer to public-access unix systems as pubnix. Then there's this term "tildeverse" that seems about the same thing to me. They are small linux computers that you can ask for a login on, and then you use a terminal program to login into them and do what you will. They tend to have internal bulletin board systems inside, and mail and chat and all that. You can share files to the outer world with www or gemini or whatever, but you don't have to.
here's some:
http://tilde.town/https://tildeverse.org/https://ctrl-c.club/http://tilde.club/https://tilde.team/https://rawtext.club/https://republic.circumlunar.space/ -- that's the one I belong to
Ah, okay... *that* kind of place.
(Thanks for the links.)
I think I do have an account with one or two of those, but use(d) them only to host gemini/gopher stuff. Didn't explore the more inner workings I think you're referring to. I was also an "SDF" member for a couple decades, beginning in the 1990s. But that was, again, more about hosting, and also to have a unix-y place to do things without having to administer such on my own machines.
I'll try taking a deeper look at a couple by attempting to interact with others therein. But I must admit it's difficult for me to come at such optimistically for feeling more or less "cancelled" in places like this, Midnight Pub, and gemini space in general. The response to writing ratio went from interesting to pathetic at some point, and I just can't believe I'm enough of a monster to warrant it.
But maybe others have cooled to exchanges like this in general?
What I probably *should* do is just abandon all this online bullshit, and focus on family. Maybe that's the overall "message from the universe". Too many eggshells to walk in these spaces.
I remember when I first starting showing things on gemini I would get mail from people. I notice that's dropped to about nothing over the years. So maybe you're not so alone in that. For what it's worth, I've always noted you as a fixture at the pub and here, and admired your level of engagement with everyone. Maybe this view will help you feel better about it.
I don't think it's ideal to associate with just one little group or community. Going all in on one thing has never served me well. I hope you don't decide to abandon it all.
I want to leave you with a post here from someone who seems to me more active on the inner pubnix community than the outer (sharing articles for all to see).
gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/five-years-a-sundog-happy-birthday-circumlunar-space.gmi
jomeworlds, I really liked that post. Makes me wanna phlog! :P
joneworlds -
> I remember when I first starting showing things on gemini
> I would get mail from people. I notice that's dropped to
> about nothing over the years. So maybe you're not so alone
> in that.
I do try hard to believe it's just this particular period of the interaction curve.
> For what it's worth, I've always noted you as a fixture
> at the pub and here, and admired your level of engagement
> with everyone. Maybe this view will help you feel better
> about it.
Oh, my, it surely does.
I guess I started leaning toward an inner theory that absence of return responses implied having chased people away, perhaps aided and abetted by awareness of so much "cancellation" going on, of late - silence representing a form of cancellation.
> I want to leave you with a post here from someone who seems
> to me more active on the inner pubnix community than the
> outer (sharing articles for all to see).
>
> gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/five-years-a-sundog-happy-birthday-circumlunar-space.gmi
Thanks for that!
say one nice thing to Inquiry and he goes all inline quote crazy on ya ;)
Really though Inquiry, you ARE a "fixture" at these little hubs and pubs (and me, too, sorta?). Hence what I was saying about e-mails I've received about you and activity across little spots on the Smol Web. List your e-mail, and you'd likely get the same :)
until later...
> say one nice thing to Inquiry and he goes all inline quote
> crazy on ya ;)
I can't help it! USENET habits can be hard to shake! :-)
> Hence what I was saying about e-mails I've received about
> you and activity across little spots on the Smol Web. List
> your e-mail, and you'd likely get the same :)
I'd decided to go more "slight effort barrier" about it by trying to remember to add my gemini capsule URL to the end of posts/replies, because there's contact information there.
And, my oh my, it's looking like I'm going to actually remember to do so this time!
gemini://textmonger.pollux.casa/