💾 Archived View for kvothe.one › gemlog › 2020-08-02.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 00:55:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
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"hello, world" from my new home on port 1965: KVOTHE-ONE!
KVOTHE-ONE is a small VPS instance running OpenBSD 6.7 and serving up gemini using solderpunk's Unsinkable Molly Brown gemini server:
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/molly-brown
It took a minute to get set up, mostly wrestling with OpenBSD networking on another VPS provider. It wasn't playing well with the QEMU virtual machine host on that provider, so I wound up setting up a Vultr VPS and it pretty much worked right out of the box. Huzzah!
Setting up Molly Brown was pretty painless. The hardest part was figuring out how to set it up as an autostarting daemon with the OpenBSD rc init system. Once I figured out how `rcctl` worked, that was that! I opened a pull request on the molly-brown repo to flesh out the OpenBSD documentation a little bit to make it easier for someone else to daemonize Molly Brown on their own OpenBSD install.
The Gemini protocol has been making waves on places like Hacker News and Lobste.rs. Reactions have been equal parts "oh, that's awesome" and "why would you do that?" I definitely belong to the former camp, having been rather fond of gopher in the past.
Truth be told, the Gemini coverage is what brought me back to phlogging on circunlunar.space last month:
gopher://circumlunar.space/1/~kvothe/
A few days ago, I downloaded the `amfora` Gemini browser:
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
I've tried a few other Gemini browsers, but this one is what clicked for me. It's so good! It reminds me of how `lynx` runs with vi-keys navigation, but with a sort of `less`-meets-markdown-renderer flair to it. I like it. A lot.
Anyway, a lot of my favorite gopher phloggers have migrated over to port 1965 and I've found myself using CAPCOM and SPACEWALK to keep up with happenings on the small Internet. After using `amfora` for a while and wrapping my head around the Gemini specification, I decided it was high time to make that move myself.
I've mixed feelings about leaving the auspices of the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu to host my own content on KVOTHE-ONE.
However, the Zaibatsu is but one part of a confederation of public-access unix servers. In some sense, it started as an exodus from SDF, my first $HOME away from home. It has, in turn, spawned many independent servers run by Circumlunar alumni. In a sense, the federation grows into a robust, loosely-coupled web of small Internet enthusiasts, and KVOTHE-ONE is but a part of that growth.
In the end, any trepidation on my part is doubly met by excitement for the proliferation of the independent, noncommercial Internet. I'm just really happy to be a part of this, the antithesis of everything HTTP has become.
So, here we are! I look forward to tinkering around on KVOTHE-ONE and sharing this community with all you amazing folks in the small Internet community. Until next time!
kvothe.