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