DIGGING A NEW GOPHERHOLE FOR MYSELF

Well I finally gave up on Aussies.space coming back any time soon,
even though Fosslinux did confirm that Gopher hosting is still
intended for it. I'm not sure why he couldn't have set all the
server configuration up on a local machine and then only needed to
switch over the configuration once it was ready, but I guess if I
want my hosting run my way I should host it myself. Actually it's
_really_ tempting to just set a Gopher server running on my VPS, in
many ways it would be easier, but it also makes identifying me
trivial. Using a separate VPS or at least IP address would help,
but then it becomes more work for me and still far less anonominity
given that governments could easily access VPS subscription IDs.

I have also flirted with the idea of just keeping this to myself. I
am quite tempted by the idea that life is all just a dream, and
it's easiest of all not to presume the existance of the funny
people who write to me out of this computer. Couldn't they all just
be a simulation? Hallucination? He stares into a glass tube
energised to dangerously high voltage, and hallucinates people from
across the globe speaking to him, and sometimes he talks back.

But to believe in nothing is to believe in everything, and I'm not
that open-minded, so I might as well conclude that there really is
someone out there to talk to. So I surveyed my options, and indeed
since Eyeblea.ch stopped resolving right at the time that
Aussies.space went down for reinvention it seems there isn't any
Australian gopher hosting available for free at the moment. I did
track down the creator of Eyeblea.ch to this Gemini capsule here:
gemini://duncan.bayne.id.au/

It's curious that he doesn't mention it anywhere there (at least
not obviously), but the same guy did announce Eyeblea.ch here a
couple of years ago:
https://lobste.rs/s/yz9qrp

I'm starting to think that the people who run these things are
weird, but then again I think everyone is weird. Anyway perhaps
it's a good thing that it went down before I wasted time setting
things up there, if sign-ups were even still working.

So I applied for a Tilde.club account a couple of days ago, and am
waiting for it to go through, if it does. As I whinged about
earlier, I was posting to their NNTP server until they recently
denied posting to people without an account. So if I get an account
then I can post there again too. Except looking into the details it
seems that really I can't, because their wiki says you need to use
encryption for the log-in (presumably for the sake of security,
though I think it's overboard), and Tin only added support for
encrypted NNTP connections in the latest release, so I'll have to
compile that myself. Plus now it's another damn internet service
requiring encryption, so another bit of the internet with an expiry
date (see
2020-05-31The_Best_Thing_About_Gopher_is_that_its_Unencrypted.txt).
Anyway I'll probably stop grumping eventually and run it on my
Internet Client like all the other horrible internet software that
insists on doing such nonsense, but I'm temped not to just because
NNTP, like Gopher, was one protocol where I thought I'd be safe
from forced encryption.

Then of course I'll have to decide what I do if Aussies.space comes
back. I do hate broken links, but keeping everything synced and
working across two servers is a pain as well. This is where HTTP
redirects are nice, although they're not used enough (I don't think
HTTP redirects were possible for users to set up at Aussies.space
either). I think I'll just archive the Tilde.club copy with a
banner at the top of each gophermap announcing the move back to
Aussies.space, then it doesn't look like I just stopped posting,
like many other phlogs do when their authors move elsewhere. Or if
Tilde.club just dies then I guess it's tough luck. It's been around
a while, but then Grex has been around a lot longer and it's
shutting down, oh, huh, today.

Anonymous emails are easy to set up. I did think about running a
script on my Internet Client which fetches emails from
[email protected] every day, and have it respond to
emails with a particular Subject header just to say the current
location of The Free Thinker on gopherspace. Would anyone use it
though? No. I mean nobody's emailed me there about being offline
anyway. OK, move on.

Oh I am wasting far too much effort thinking about all this. Maybe
I should just decide that you're all a dream and there's no point
talking back to you. But that's wasting time now too. No, I'll go
hang out the washing and then move stuff around in the shed so I
can try to fit my work cage / car servicing platform in there
because getting permission to build a new shed around it really is
too much trouble/expense.

- The Free Thinker

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