grumblings about the small internet
I don't want to be overly negative and venty like some of my last few entries
have been. I'm feeling *pretty good* right now. I drew some stuff on my new
drawing tablet, I saw the new Star Wars movie with my family (it was okay, not
anything I'd go see again), I've got the next week and a half to just *chill
out*. Can't hate life right now.
That said wow is running a server an interesting experience. I've been reading
some stuff about the Small Internet[1] and yeah, I like the whole idea of it
but I also *completely* understand why big mega-sites like Twitter and Reddit
exist. Administrating a server is something that takes time and skill, and if
you just want to post memes you'd better either hope one of your friends is a
big tech nerd or you give up on the idea of the small internet.
I'm mostly writing all of this because the other administrator I recently gave
admin access to was trying to install mosh[2] and accidentially broke the server
for a little bit until I was able to log on and fix it. No hard feelings, at
all, he's been incredibly helpful with helping me figure out stuff like SSH key
login and other important things. But on the small internet, these sorts of
things can and will happen. You have to worry about backups and updates and
vulnerability issues and all sorts of things.
Another thing is IRC. I hate IRC. It's fine for what it is but Discord and other
things like that are so, SO much better. Message history. Inline images. Emotes.
NNTP is a complex replacement for subreddits, an actual message board like
Jul[3] is completely and totally overkill for small servers like this,
Mastodon is a really nice Twitter replacement but the whole decentralized server
concept is a bit much to wrap your head around at first.
I guess the big thing is that I whole-heartedly agree with the ideas of the
small internet, that we can do everything we need with less, that we can just
not ever have to deal with twitter and facebook et. all scraping the scraps of
our souls for advertisement revenue. It just isn't very accessible, unless
millions of people just up and joins tilde.town or tilde.club or etc., and
that's hardly a better situation.
I'm weary of any sort of "I'm doing this the hard way because it makes me a REAL
computer user" sorta talk. (looking at you, Arch Linux users. ;/) Just feels
like elitism for the sake of elitism. Like a "hah hah i'm better for you because
i know how to use Vim~!" thing. I realize that's not the attitude of most people
on the pubnixverse, and I know a lot of them genuinely do want more people.
I have to give major MAJOR props to the tilde.town team for having a very nice
and user-friendly signup form[4], a help-desk ticketing system, a detailed and
comprehensive wiki[5], open-source software[6][7], etc. etc. All the tildes
really, but tilde.town just stands out to me. I want more of that. I want a
pubnix to be as easy to use as Mastodon or Neocities.
Neocities especially, I don't like the fact that it doesn't have any direct file
upload option unless you shell out $5/mo (and even then it's WebDAV, blegh) but
just the sheer amount of good, quality websites I've seen on that place is
absolutely amazing. If it weren't for Neocities I would not be running this
server right now. More Neocities, more Mastodon, more tilde servers, less stupid
elitism over IRC bouncers like they're the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Things I'd like to see, and I'd totally work on if I had more time and resources
- An IRC alternative that is as full-featured and user-friendly as Discord,
but also open-source
- A user-friendly NNTP/Usenet frontend (i haven't looked into this much though)
Something resembling an actual message board instead of a bunch of emails.
- An easier way to do the SSH keygen stuff (from PuTTY itself would be
preferable, right now you need another program for that and eeeeegh...)
- A Gophermap IDE/WYSIWYG builder, to avoid the pain of typing them out by hand
when most people have never seen a Gophermap in their lives
- On that note another decent HTML builder program like Frontpage, except
integrated with Hugo/Jekyll/etc. instead of weird proprietary stuff.
This isn't a "do this for me plz" thing, I have no expectation of these things
ever getting done. But oh heck would it make this small internet thing more
paletable, because I truly do believe in it. I just also believe there's a
reason everyone ditched MS-DOS for Windows 3.1 and 95 and later ditched that
for Androids and iPhones the very first chance they could.
[1]: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/%7espring/phlog
[2]: https://mosh.org/
[3]: https://github.com/Xkeeper0/jul
[4]: https://cgi.tilde.town/users/signup
[5]: http://tilde.town/wiki/toc.html
[6]: https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club
[7]: https://tildegit.org/explore/repos