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<title>Adventures in Zotland and Minty Meadows - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
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<p><b>Adventures in Zotland and Minty Meadows</b></p>
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<p><b>published: 3-17-2019</b></p>
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<p> </p>
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<p>A few years ago, back in a weary rainy place I outgrew several years later, some of my friends and companions and I were sitting around a fire, tending to it right before we would make our lunch. I had to go inside the cabin for something- what, exactly, has slipped my mind- and I must have forgotten that one of my friends was making minty tea, because the entire place <em>reeked</em> of mint. Like I'd stepped into a middle-schooler's mouth after a gum-chewing session, hastily spat out before class so they didn't get sent to the principal's office.</p>
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<p>After work yesterday, I stepped into my dorm room, and it was like I was back in that cabin. Because the whole place, instead of the characteristic <em>nothing</em> that I've taken to assume is just how I smell, the mint was everywhere, and it was nigh-unbearable for a few hours until it just faded into the background with everything else. Of course, it could have just been the heater too, which my roommate must have cranked up as well without letting me know. (I keep it off because I have issues regulating my body temperature, and I always feel like I'm burning up to a crisp otherwise.)</p>
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<p>Recently, I've been flirting with the idea of using <a href="https://tails.boum.org">Tails</a> as my primary operating system, starting with a month of Tails-only to really push the system's limits. Given the current theme of "freedom in restriction" here in circumlunar space, it's... a trip and a half. Plain SSH and SFTP work exactly the same, since SSH keys are one of the official persistence slots that come pre-configured. Calibre's stopped working because one of the Qt libraries refuses to install, but I've built an AppImage for Calibre, and I've recently taken to just converting my PDFs to Markdown anyway. A handful of emulators work, given that they put their config files in your home directory and you put that in your dotfiles and you manually copy over your savestates each way each time after you play. Keybase, however, doesn't work, and neither does Beaker Browser, which, if I were to get serious about this, would kill two of my websites right off the bat. Keybase because it uses some esoteric system of putting its config files god-knows-where, Beaker Browser because Tails blocks all non-Tor traffic and BB doesn't have any options to configure a proxy to use said Tor connection.</p>
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<p>Kodachi, which I currently use on my laptop, would be a far superior option in live mode if:</p>
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<ol style="list-style-type: decimal">
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<li><p>it actually supported encrypted persistence the way Tails does, so the flash drive doesn't immediately kill itself with all the read-writes of a normal system, and</p></li>
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<li><p>I could turn off MAC spoofing, which would actually make it useful on networks such as my college's where everything is captive-portalled to hell and back, and</p></li>
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<li><p>there was a way other than disassembling the ISO to disable whatever font engine Kodachi uses that makes the entire system slow to a crawl, forced to constantly toggle between TTY0 and the X session in order for the screen to update.</p></li>
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</ol>
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<p>Either/or, it would go a long way in calming the paranoia that's suddenly jacked up in me again what with recent events. Freedom in restriction: freedom from having to remember to clean out old logs, freedom from persistent cookies and trackers following me from session to session, freedom from a billion shoddily-written programs that just enabled me to waste my time in all sorts of ways. The tininess of the persistent storage partition also forces me to decide: which files are actually valuable in the case of a sudden evacuation? Is this 200 MB PDF really worth it, or can its text be extracted and filler images thrown away?</p>
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<p>Thankfully, at the time of writing this, neither anyone at the Zaibatsu nor the Republic has expressed their opinion on the New Zealand shooting. I can only hope that this is intentional, that everything there is to say on the absolute mess of a manifesto that he published has already been said: that free speech is a critical human right, and that taking it away will just drive the groups that spawned that vile murderer further out of the light of public scrutiny.</p>
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<p>And that, speaking from personal experience, <em>Spyro the Dragon 3</em> has fuck-all to do with "ethno-nationalism". Was this a meme before? Did I miss out on a memetic memo somewhere? I don't understand.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, I can't say the same about... the other group of people I hung out with. Am I really a "dumb radical centrist" for not fitting cleanly into the left-right paradigm? Is free speech on the internet really a myth? (I must be writing this on Mt. Olympus, then.) And is spending time with smug techbros who go "UM, AKSCHUALLY" at every opportunity, closeted racists, and borderline pedophiles <em>really</em> the best use of my time?</p>
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<p>It looks like I'm a nomad again. Another set of accounts burned, another batch of usernames and passwords changed.</p>
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<p>For whatever reason- I don't know if this is intentional on the developers' part, or this is just an <em>especially</em> nasty bug- but I can't seem to actually delete any of my old Pleroma profiles. It disallows me from logging in, but the full profiles still show up on all the instances they were federated to, and other users can still interact with them. Ghosts of myself that I can't banish, can't sweep away into the trash to be forgotten by time.</p>
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<p>As a result, I've almost completely soured on social media, despite the aforementioned Keybase troubles preventing me from going completely to one RSS feed that's been verified to actually be <em>mine</em>. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of network that was <em>truly</em> nomadic (unlike the current setup, where a move would have to be announced ahead of time to avoid losing people), <em>and</em> respected its users' privacy at the same time (unlike Pleroma), <em>and</em> kept random strangers from spamming everything into oblivion (Neocities, and every other social media site in existence)?</p>
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<p>Oh, wait, that's an actual thing! It's called <a href="https://zotlabs.org/help/en/about/about#Glossary">the Zot protocol</a>. In the form of <a href="https://zotlabs.com/zap/">Zap</a>, but more frequently <a href="https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project">Hubzilla</a>.</p>
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<p>The project itself isn't particularly remarkable at first glance: it looks like an awful Facebook clone from ten years ago, complete with an <a href="https://hub.disroot.org/help/en/comanche">esoteric website-making language</a>, and a labyrinth of privacy options, and all of its functionality spread out across a billion plugins.</p>
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<p>And crickets, because... it's awfully empty. Which can be dirtily resolved by installing the "ActivityPub Protocol" plugin and adding all my old friends from the fediverse, but then, at the top of all their profile pages, a warning reads:</p>
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<p align="center">
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<b>This connection may be unreachable from other channel locations.<br /> Location independence is not supported by their network.</b>
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</p>
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<p>And then I thank the silence. Because there might not be very many people there, but the few that I can hear, I know they are free. They're not tied to a single identity. If their admin goes sour, or their server gets suddenly shut down by a power outage or a government seizure or some other disaster, they can easily pack up and move to a different server with all their connections and settings like nothing had ever happened.</p>
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<p>Of course, ActivityPub (what powers Pleroma and Mastodon and the like) wasn't built for this. It was built with the expectation that people would stay in one place forever, or, if they moved, they'd have the time beforehand to alert people of their new location. So why should I persist in a place where my feet are stuck in the mud?</p>
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<blockquote>
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<a href="https://z.macgirvin.com/channel/mike/?f=&mid=b64.aHR0cHM6Ly96Lm1hY2dpcnZpbi5jb20vaXRlbS82YmUyZjVlYi02ZmNiLTQ2MmQtYTA5Yi1jMzViNGI3YzlkYzc">
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<p>
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If you are interested in a "fediverse" of "social networking projects" which can all communicate and work together seamlessly, it is time for you to get off the Zot6 train. It is not stopping at your station.
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</p>
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<p>
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Zot6 is standing up for the right of people to have nomadic identities, privacy, and granular permissions over their profiles and content (including their media content). It is also standing up for the right of people to not be forced to accept spam or unsolicited replies to their content from people they don't know or never heard of (or who they have even <em>blocked</em>). Unfortunately these rights are incompatible with the rest of the so-called "fediverse" (and "federation"). Hence all connections to those networks are being severed.
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</p>
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</a>
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</blockquote>
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<p>One would think, with all the complaints on the leftist side of the fediverse about "trolls" and the such constantly swarming in their connections, they'd instantly jump on a network that would allow them the ability to fine-tune who gets to interact with them. But that would be too hard, wouldn't it? Give up meaningless internet points and a few hours of time that could instead be spent complaining and nursing an extensive defederation list.</p>
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<p>If you want freedom in this world, you have to seek it out yourself, <em>grab it</em> yourself, instead of just sitting on your ass and complaining.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<a href="https://forum.yunohost.org/t/osada-zap-version-2-2/6156">
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<p>
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Zap and Osada do one thing (social networking) and do it well.
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</p>
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<p>
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Use Osada if you want a really good ActivityPub server, and use Zap if you want or need nomadic identity and much stronger privacy than the fediverse can offer.
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</p>
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<p>
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Select one or the other. You can’t have it all. That actually doesn’t work - and there isn’t any way to make it work.
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</p>
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<p>
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Zap will always be the smaller network, because people will always give up their privacy to follow the herd and be where their friends are.
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</p>
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<p>
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Use Hubzilla if you actually know what a ‘platform’ is and want to build something great (decentralised communities and cities with shoppes and businesses that all respect your freedom) rather than than just waste your life in idle chit-chat.
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</p>
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</a>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I don't want to waste my days in idle chit-chat, discussing who's the best anime girl of the week or whatever drama's brewing on The Whole Known Network or trying to figure out who's a genuine fascist and who's just posting edgy memes for the sadistic shit-stirring and snickers and smug JPEGs. I want my freedom of movement, and I want my freedom of association, and I want it <em>now,</em> shallow friendships be damned!</p>
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<p>Of course, the absolute paradise scenario would be a world where everyone had fellowsh and their own pubnix that they ran or belonged to and their own gopherhole. But then we run into the nomadic identity problem again, and that would be a <em>lot</em> of people in gopherspace to sift through, wouldn't it? And fellowsh really isn't the best place to announce new posts- you don't log in for a few days, and depending on how quickly people update their .plan and .project files, you could miss a great deal, or someone could blink out of existence without a trace.</p>
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<p>It's a Small Internet you and I live in, and it's the biggest world I've ever seen.</p>
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</body></html>
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