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	Black
	March 10th, 2018
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	If you're reading this that means that my sdf gopher hole is dead.

	That's dramatic!

	Recently there was a second round of shake-ups in the SDF gopher
	space. Unlike sdf.org, which has been running gophernicus for
	quite a while, gopher.club suddenly forked away and started
	running a different server. This was a surprise for most of us
	since gopher.club was just an alias for SDF, or so we thought. The
	change blew up a few of the prettier gopher holes like jynx and
	cat's. Mine was relatively unscathed, but it raised an issue in my
	mind. SDF is not a safe space for things to live.

	SDF is a test-bed for lots of things. It does some fantastic work
	in aiding the stability of NetBSD. I know better than to host
	a critical web site there, but for some reason I thought of it as
	a place where gopher holes could persist relatively unscathed over
	time. It's been running for so long already, what could change
	that, right?

	Then in the matter of months we witness some pretty big shifts in
	the system. The worst part of it is the lack of communication.
	There was no warning of changes coming, no announcement of why or
	to what end, nothing. The SDF users are pretty relaxed about it,
	but it still put that nagging thought in the back of my mind. Is
	this really safe?

	So on a whim I bought a handful of gopher domains while at a diner
	for lunch. One of these is gopher.black, my new home. It's running
	on a raspberry pi in my spare room, clinging to my wifi and
	dangling on the edge of the desk without so much as a plastic
	case. Is this safe? Well, no. I'll get a case for it tomorrow and
	hard-wire it to the network. I've set up dynamic dns through
	namesilo.com using their API and a little python. I've still got
	to configure the pi to restart the gopher server upon reboot.
	There's plenty of work to be done.

	Is it reliable, is it safe? Well, no and yet yes. I'm running
	things myself and in the end that's where reliability is. Do it
	yourself, own it, and you can trust it. Anything else is false
	hope.

	Black thoughts for gopher.black? I think it's hopeful.

	I wish the SDF gopher community the best. I'll still be active all
	over SDF, in IRC, com, even anonradio. I love it there, but I've
	learned my lesson not to trust it with my stuff.