I've been thinking a lot lately about what we want The Small
Internet to be like (thanks for that, spring!). Of course,
that thinking did not emerge in a vaccuum. The conversations
on the BBS at circumlunar.space and on various phlogs have
been prodding me in that direction. One of the things that
worries me most is the possibility, raised by KatolaZ, that
we might reproduce The Large Internet here -- how is it that
we human beings are so often our own worst enemies?

I'm guilty. I created an LXer mirror, reproducing web
content in gopherspace (currently broken due to some change
at LXer or one of it's regular contributor sites. I may fix
it or I may not). I also set up an XMPP server, so that you
may be (by your own free choice, of course) continuously
bombarded by the unending cacophony of your c.s. friends and
never have any downtime. I'm kidding. There are six of us
and it's pretty quiet! But I created that potential. So I
feel like I'm contributing to the erosion of the best thing
I've found -- gopherspace. As I've mentioned before, gopher
is the slow food of the internet. Everything slows down
here. The assault on your senses is reduced, if not
eliminated. And as many of you have noted, it's the
do-it-yourself 'net. People are creators and not simply
consumers[1]. Those are its greatest assets.

Seliph wrote a couple of pieces[2] recently in which I
recognized myself. Like Seliph, I have burned too brightly
in a frenzy of creation; I have felt the fool in my
self-revelation; I have been overwhelmed by my integration
into the great Collective (the internet reminds me of
nothing if not the Borg), with its expectations,
responsibilities, and unceasing connective demands; and I
have sought to 'erase myself.' Last spring, I did exactly
that, without a single word of warning, deleting my social
media accounts *everywhere* over the course of a couple of
days. To be fair, I haven't had Facebook since 2009, so it
was probably easier for me than it would be for many. About
four months later, I recreated a few of them (reddit, mobile
nations, HPC:Factor), but my level of involvement is not the
same, most likely because I found this space.

So in this climate, when apparently manifestos are all the
rage, this is mine:

I won't contaminate this environment in which I thrive.



[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/h/~seliph/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2019/january/vagrancy.html
   gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/h/~seliph/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2019/january/ouroboros.html