Gopher resiliency (circumlunar.space), 11/14/2019
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I was around in the BBS days, but for whatever reason,
gopher never got on my radar. I went from the dial-up BBS to
straight to dial-up internet using http on the www. For me,
gopher came a few years ago, by chance while I was fiddling
with an old DOS packet driver setup.
What a world to discover! I jumped in with both feet, but
without much thought. I started with SDF, and branched out
from there to grex and beyond. I think I have maybe 6-8
gopher holes on various systems at this point. There may be
more than that.
Now I'm starting to think about resiliency, about my ability
to adjust and recover, to roll with changes, in all my
gopher activity. Perhaps I don't have any, and maybe that's
OK. Perhaps some of my gopher holes can just die off
quietly, and I can come and go as I please with the others.
It's nice to know that this whole thing is small- as in,
Small Internet (credit can float where it needs to for the
term, I can't recall who wrote on it now... spring, that was
it[1]). It's simple, it's cozy, it's non-permanent.
Wait... was non-permanent part of Spring's thing, or is that
a Circumlunar thing?
In any case, I was thinking about resiliency. Part of it,
for me, is backups. I have a backup of my grex content. As
they have gone down and up and down, and have continued to
have issues with gopher server performance, it's been
comforting to know that my data is here at my house, where
it belongs, and not just stuck somewhere. I've moved some
things here, and I'll move more things. Maybe I'll take up
again at grex, I have no idea.
Another part of it is letting go. I'm not a Buddhist, but
it's valuable to me to be able to let go. It's valuable
because I'm incapable of clinging solidly to everything
forever. I have to be OK with letting go, because letting go
is part of my reality.
So, backups and letting go; so far, two things in some kind
of metaphysical opposition. But I think they're part of the
balance of resiliency. I keep my backups, and I move my data
around, because it makes me feel like I can hold on to
things. I accept when things are lost, or projects don't
work out, or a gopher hole that I was excited about dies a
little, because I feel good letting go.
All of this is just to meander, because that's the mood I'm
in. Also, I've been thinking that some of the server admins
have got to be wondering what the point is of hosting my old
data if I'm not really going to continue what I started.
Heck, it's time to be out with it, to air my dirty laundry.
These are the sites I'm thinking about:
[] gopher://vernunftzentrum.de:70/1/tfurrows/index.gph
[] gopher://dome.circumlunar.space:70/1/~wells/
[] gopher://cosmic.voyage:70/1/ships/Xero Carbon Wells
[] gopher://colorfield.space:70/1/~tfurrows
That felt good. For whatever reasons, these sites are the
ones that I'm not keeping up with. I'm tepid about some of
them, and passionate about others. I don't want to let them
go, but I don't want to mistreat the admins either, who I
know and respect.
What would you do in my shoes? What do you do in your shoes?
[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt