Several phloggers have responded to my appeal for their
insights on editing phlogs after publication. Here's my
summation (but read their phlogs -- they're good). Perhaps
their views can serve as guides for all of us in terms of
reasonable practice.

On the RPoD phlog[1], Jynx wrote that he usually allows
himself to make minor revisions for the first hour or so
after publication (I like this and it fits with the
practices permitted on many forums). In a worst-case-
scenario of regret, he would delete the entry entirely. I
would too.

zlg (ze libertine gamer) contends that (on the principle of
the rights of authorship) he reserves the to alter his
posts, especially in cases where his views have changed over
time. That being said, he uses git for version control, so
successive versions are saved for posterity[2]. He also
brings up stalking and doxxing, which never occurred to me,
but those are serious issues and good points. Finally, he
suggests noting that posts have been edited, which seems
like good form to me as well.

Yargo wrote that he indicates that posts have been edited in
the title (a good practice, and probably the best place to
provide the indication) and never removes content as a point
of fairness to readers[3]. I completely understand this
position and the reasons for it, but I also understand
Jynx's suggestion that content might be removed. I probably
would remove a post if it had not become the subject of
debate, but would leave it if others had responded to it. In
the context of all of the suggestions above, I think that if
a writer was to delete a phlog entry, it would be best to
leave a notice that they had chosen to do so. That seems
like a reasonable middle-ground.

As for my decision to delete the LXer mirror, Jynx expressed
some reservations and worried that we're turning a
philosophical position into a religion. Point taken. That
was not my intention, but I think he was correct to point
out that it could be the result. So here's my
tongue-in-cheek response: I'm no one's Richard Stallman. ;)
I would never counsel anyone to follow my example. The best
thing about the _small_internet_ is freedom. Do what you
want to do. I'll criticize my own practices, but I won't
criticize yours (though I will engage with your ideas).

Finally, cdmnky's recent phlog discussed decentralizing
gopher[4]. I have also considered linking to files on
another gopher server in non-transparent ways via
gophermaps. Other than the possibility of individual server
failure, I don't see any problem with it. In fact, it could
be a very beneficial practice: you could use this strategy
to reduce the load on shared servers. For example, if I
wanted to host files and share them, I'd probably put them
on my server rather than on circumlunar.space, because
circumlunar.space is a shared and limited resource and I
feel like there are reasonable expectations that I won't tax
that shared resource disproportionately.


[1] gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20190125.post
[2] gopher://zlg.space/0/phlog/2019-01-25_1644.txt
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~yargo/clog/yq-phlog-revisions.txt
[4] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/cdmnky/phlog/2019/01-25/