20231106-little_people.txt
I was getting too agitated with people on the WWW recently. It
resulted in some censorship/ghost-banning with no real explanation or
even notification. Or maybe it had nothing to do with my agitation.
Sometimes on that site I get ghost-banned for no discernible reason
whatsoever. That's what happens when you moderate using A.I.
Anyway, I decided to look up some more Gopher stuff. It's honestly
pretty nice to get back to the little people, the nice ones, the ones
that are nice because they don't really have an interaction. Maybe
that says something about my social skills. But thoughts are
published. There are no reply threads. There are no pleas to follow,
subscribe, donate, or advertise. People don't write to get attention
(not that it would really work). People just write what they want
simply because they have thoughts they want to write down and share,
not because they want certain social credit.
The little people here create thought-provoking posts, usually. I love
going on Magical.Fish and seeing the live chat and discovering new
things. It's not terribly busy and you can subscribe via a feed if you
like. There are a decent range of posts there, although usually not
too crazy (thankfully). It's just a nice place and one of my favorite
sites that has a lot of selectors.
I've mentioned it before, but one of the best parts of Gopher is the
adventure and discoverability of it. It's so organic and not
commercialized or curated. You find things through recommendations,
agenda-less searches, or simply selector lists. It's nice. There are
many different domains you can visit and the only "huge" ones I know
are Floodgap, SDF, and Bitreich. Those are the ones, in my experience,
that most people know about and use. I could be wrong. Tilde.town is
pretty popular, too.
This post is a salute to the little people, the small sincere voices
that usually have the most poignant and profound things to say, things
that would be buried by lowest-common-denominator posts. With Gopher,
everything is buried, but digging is the best way to find treasure.
