2019-12-12 - I made dat
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I made a site using the dat protocol.

The site is an amalgam, of sorts.

I am  burned out on the  internet. I refuse to  be commoditized by
companies  which  have  no  respect  for  law,  for  privacy,  for
democracy, for the values which I hold.

I have been  putting the energies which I previously  wasted on my
blog into gopherspace - gopher, the system I first experienced the
"internet" on, many years ago.

I am  also interested in  the decentralized internet. It,  and the
systems it  offers to  reclaim our voices  absent the  control and
surveillance systems of the modern  "web", is something that I can
really  get excited  about. There's  a huge  problem, however,  in
that  much  of the  decentralized  space  is shackled  by  idiotic
subservience to the blockchain.

Enter dat. The  dat protocol - https://docs.datproject.org  - is a
decentralized system  which doesn't rely on  blockchain. Getting a
site up on the dat-web is a task of elemental simplicity.

I   had  previously   run  a   dat  version   of  my   homesite  -
https://ascraeus.org - but I seem to  have gotten a little lost on
the  way. Bloated,  swollen, the  site was  just a  repeat of  the
surveillance-crippled homepage.

Thinking anew recently, I thought  I could bring the same interest
I now have in my gopher  site to the decentralized internet. Using
the same  simple text-based posts to  create a site for  myself in
this new and interesting world.

Using  the same  functionality provided  by the  hugo static  site
generator I  used for  my homesite,  I recreated  my phlog  on the
dat:// protocol. All 290kb of it. That's just 82kb larger than the
size of the text files on my gopher.

To access the dat site, you'll  need to use the beaker browser. My
dat is at:

dat://7659c6b87ae04f979ecfc24d136242ad0b6105ed3818d651e99216b31ceaf58b

or you can just use dat://ascraeus.org

What do I hope to achieve by this?

Nothing. I'm  not sure anyone  reads my  phlog, let alone  will be
troubled  to read  the same  content  over an  arcane and  complex
protocol.

But by doing *something* I am  doing more than doing *nothing*. If
my  use  of dat://  helps  in  any way  to  normalise  use of  the
protocol, then I'm happy.

Thank you for reading.

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