Tue Apr 26 14:17:03 UTC 2022

1) Coffee: Don't make it complicated

90% of good  coffee is good water  and grinding the beans fresh  every time. I
use filtered  water. The beans  are medium roast,  nothing special. I  make it
with a Bialetti stovetop  espresso maker, pour it into a  32 ounce thermos and
fill it  up the  rest of  the way  with hot  water. The  result is  strong and
flavorful without being overpowering, and reasonably economical.

2) Online engagement and addictive interface

I notice a lot of posts in Gopher and Gemini spaces bemoaning the deliberately
addictive nature of  social media. To me,  part of the problem  is that social
media isn't  very social. And  taking the corporation  out of the  equation as
much as  possible doesn't necessarily  change anything. SDF is  certainly more
active than a lot of similar communities, especially in terms of Gopher sites.
But community  is what  happens not when  everyone is off  in their  own space
doing their oiwn  thing, but when people come together.  With Gopher, even the
ability to  link elsewhere feels  clumsy and superfluous. The  isolated Usenet
groups that are  still active and mostly  free of spam -  those are definitely
communities, but  most of them  are even  smaller than SDF's  currently active
Gopherspace. And most attempts to get something of this nature off the ground,
like the  various Tilde  orgs, only  seem to  do really  well if  they connect
themselves with a physical locale. In some ways the time seems right for a BBS
resurgence, at least if properly packaged and presented.

As far as addiction, I like my interfaces  efficient. I want to be able to sit
down at the machine,  do my thing, and get back up and  go back to doing other
things. And  if I do spend  any significant amount  of time at the  screen and
keyboard, I don't want it wasted by bloat, gaslighting, marketing surveillance
and covert agendas.

3) Speaking of Usenet

For everyone advocating NNTP, how about  getting NNTP support back in Citadel?
That's been moribund/absent for some time  now. Great way to have a consistent
and easy  to use  unified interface  for local  and networked  discussion. And
there's still a text client under the hood.