________ ________ ________
2018-06-28 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
So here we are, sports fans, I've finally / _/ / /
moved out of smj's basement and into my own \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
Gopher space. Right up front I want to be / \/ \/ / \
clear that the move isn't out of any problem / _/ /_ _/
or dissatisfaction with the SDF and its /- / _/ /
Gopher space, it's an exciting community and \________/\________/\___/____/
one completely unlike any other you'll find
online and I'm proud to be an active member of it. If you aren't already a
member the fuck are you sleepin' on it for?
In line with Tomasino's move to gopher.black and Solderpunk's to
circumlunar.space, this move is more about decentralising Gopher. A large part
of the active phlogosphere makes their home on SDF and without a doubt it's
still the best place to get seen if you're new to Gopher. The downside of
that, though is that when the SDF is down for maintenance, NetBSD testing or
because some dildo files a report to whoever and claims it's "the dark web"
that same large part of the active phlogosphere becomes unreachable.
I'm just doing my small part to mitigate that a bit by separating myself
from that single point of failure and in the process grow my skills a little,
learning a little server setup and maintenance skills and if everything goes
to plan a little electronics skills too. Short term I'm just hosting on a
cheap VPS but once the dust settles on some stuff I've got going on IRL I'm
going to try and move it off onto a Raspberry Pi or similar. I have some fun
plans for that but we'll see how much works out haha.
What I won't be doing though, is mirroring my space. I'll leave all the
files I already have on SDF where they are, so any references to them on other
peoples' phlog posts or whatever will still work but I won't be mirroring any
new content back to my SDF space, it'll only be added to baud.baby.
Since I'm moving off of the SDF, if you'll indulge me I want to revisit one
of the reasons I cited for even using Gopher and starting a phlog.
Back in June 2017 I wrote:
"Utilising the SDF; I've been a member for a while but mostly all I
did was log in every now and then, type "ls" and log off again.
There's a lot to the SDF and there's a lot they do that just isn't
done anywhere else. It really is a treasure that should be
appreciated and utilised more. I don't know shit about BSD or Gopher
or any of that (spent over an hour last night just trying to format a
fancy heading and failed), but trying to do as much as I can natively
rather than doing it all where I'm more comfortable and transferring
it across gives me a chance to learn to do more in BSD and on SDF."
While I still have a long way to go, I'm vastly more comfortable in BSD
than I was back when I wrote this and know Gopher stuff really well and, for
the most important part, I feel like I've really followed through on my desire
to utilise and contribute to the SDF more and participate in the community.
I've gone from "just having a shell in case I need it for whatever reason"
to being logged in whenever I can, updating my Gopher (reasonably) often,
chatting on IRC, com and the SDF's Mastodon instance, messing with the VoIP
network and tuning in to aNONradio and only recently but hopefully more often
participated in an Open VoIP call.