MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

ouroboros

published: 1-19-2019

I’ve been feeling too anxious recently. It might have something to do with all the new social media platforms I’ve been trying out recently in an attempt to keep up with all the “friends” I’ve made on the fediverse. Osada, Hubzilla, Friendica, they’re all lovely platforms with great features. The problem is, 99% of the people I follow are on ActivityPub protocol servers, which makes the security and privacy features on these other platforms useless since they were written with other protocols in mind. And of all those people, I could count the ones I’ve spoken more than a few words to (and thus recognize out of the sea of words) on one hand!

What happened to the Vane Vander who abhorred social media? What happened to the me who rejected clout in favor of a life less frightening?

Time is a circle, indeed, whether it be the Circle proper or just another name for whatever deity made this universe.

But I need a way independent of my RSS feed to notify people of new posts, just in case one of my website mirrors goes down and I’m unfortunate enough for it to be the one people subscribed to the most. Mastodon and Pleroma worked for a time, but I was always one bad actor’s reshare away from getting vile comments piped straight into my notifications. Plus, it never stayed just a blog feed; I always felt the need to jump in to whatever discourse the fediverse was brewing. Something about chasing clout and followers.

Let me digress for a moment and discuss why the fediverse, FLOSS as it may be, really isn’t the place for someone like me:

1. Blindly following any kind of fediverse blocklist is an idiotic decision. Entrusting one person, or a small handful of people, with the decision to make potentially devastating decisions regarding who can federate with who is irresponsible. And yet, the choice in instances seems to be split three ways: servers which follow the blocklist religiously and have a somewhat decent userbase (if you ignore the occasional hatemobbing), instances that take a stand against the blocklist and inevitably end up with a sea of filth, or instances that have almost no people on them whatsoever and so it wouldn’t matter anyway. If I want to follow people on a banned instance, but at the same time don’t want to deal with biblethumpers calling me a faggot at every turn, I’m shit out of luck.

2. Because the blocklists cause so much fragmentation on the fediverse, there’s a lot more pressure to conform to the majority opinion of whatever instance you end up joining. Of course, if you go on a leftist instance and start spewing Nazi propaganda, you’re going to get banned, and rightfully so. But there’s a major difference between a Nazi and someone who’s just not a radical leftist. Your instance could be about Linux, or computers in general, or video games, or writing, or whatever- and if you don’t conform to the politics of your admin, you’re probably going to get banned, unless you’re lucky and get one of the few admins who’s just there to keep illegal material (like child pornography) out.

3. Just like any other social media platform, the dopamine rush of checking for notifications is addictive. This is my main complaint. This won’t change whether it’s Twitter from the days of old, or Instagram, or any flavor of ActivityPub. The trifecta of Osada, Hubzilla, and Friendica, to a lesser extent, since the interface is so arcane it’s hard to see what’s going on at any given moment. They’re better, but the ActivityPub chatter still feels overwhelming, and a social media site is useless without people to be “social” on it with.

About a week ago, I took a break from most of my social media. I won’t go into details, since you don’t need to know, but it was pretty… nasty, mental-wise. And things started to look up for me. I read more, and I paid more attention in class, and if I stayed up late into the night, it was because I was drawing something. Mostly more icons for my eventual return, but making something nonetheless.

I came back yesterday. Nothing catastrophic’s happened, but… I don’t feel that strange happiness anymore. Dopamine rushes, definitely, but nothing lasting. Just another ball of anxiety deep in my chest.

I don’t want to end up as a pithy article on Encyclopedia Dramatica. I know it’ll happen eventually- death comes for everyone eventually- but not now. Not when I’m still stuck in one place, dependent on the people around me. Once I’m nomadic and more financially independent, then I won’t be as scared of a doxxing or a hitpiece from ED. I know I’ve got to keep pushing forward, no matter what anyone does, but there’s… something about social media that sets off the frantic religious fanatic in me. Something that compels me to keep making a bigger and bigger fool of myself, more and more fodder for those who would do me harm.

I’ve been experimenting with a shell script as a hacked-together social media feed of sorts. As of right now, it’s basically just a text file full of one-liners, complete with GPG signatures to verify that they’re coming from me. I won’t release the code yet, especially since:

1. It’s full of weird hacks and lines with personal information I can’t compartmentalize into variables. Most of it’s concentrated in the part that non-interactively uploads statuses.txt to all the SFTP servers I keep a Gopher mirror of MayVaneDay on. I really don’t want to offload this to rclone, since that’ll add another dependency (and rclone doesn’t support SFTP in the older releases), but that’s the only way I can see right now to make everything non-interactive without leaking my personal setup everywhere.

2. I’d like to implement some kind of post fetching and local feed for both those using this particular status tool and for public ActivityPub profiles via the hidden RSS feed each one has. Social media is useless without people to be social with. Maybe, in the future, I’ll even implement some kind of heads-up if a particular keyword (usually one’s alias) was found in the retrieved posts. But then again, this might bring up the whole dopamine issue again, which would negate the point of this project.

Plus GPG doesn’t like signing things over SSH for some reason, so all the actual post creation has to happen on a local machine. And multiline messages are broken, and it doesn’t automatically clear all posts made before a certain date…

But it’s a start, and the crappiness of it all negates any dopamine, and it’s all mine!

I’ve made a Gopher browser, too. It’s a pain in the ass to use, and it doesn’t have any sort of “back” function or bookmarks or anything cool like the people on circumlunar.space (here, if you’re reading it there) have made. Plus, it only likes plaintext posts, and I like HTML formatting better. And I’ve started work on a shitty calendar in Python, which reads data from a CSV file and spits out which events I have for today. The calendar only understands basic weekday patterns, like “every Monday” or “every Tuesday and Thursday”, but for college, where the schedule is relatively the same, it works, and it works well as a shortcut widget in Termux on my phone.

These weren’t my original ideas to start with- visiblink, along with others at the Zaibatsu, inspired me. One should make their own tools, or at least try. If not for the utility, then for the fun, and for the learning. A pushback- no, a revolt against the age of Electron and browser-based apps and seventeen different frameworks for tasks that we used to do in much simpler terms.

A revolt against the state of modern technology, rejecting false progress, rejecting the convenience of the surveillance state for the basic freedom to breathe without permission!

It would be silly for us to spy on ourselves, wouldn’t it?

At this rate, I’ll have an entire distro made, just for me- you know, that might actually be a fun challenge. Take a minimal Debian ISO and go wild with it. Play around with partial airgapping and meshnets, see how low I can make the package count go.

Life after death, life after the next revolution of Ouroboros.