💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202110 › 20211030-switchboards.gmi captured on 2021-12-06 at 14:29:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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In the early days of telephony, placing a call required a switchboard operator to manually connect the two lines that wanted to talk to each other. This was a very human process, with conscious intent behind every step of the connection, including the end.
Geminispace, and most of the rest of the small Web, has that same feel for me. Of course no-one has to connect physical wires for us to connect to each other's capsules, but the "intent"-ional spirit has remained. All tools that we build are designed for humans to share with other humans, and the interests of humans are put ahead of all else.
There's nothing wrong with tools that themselves use other tools to achieve a goal. But I feel that too much of the modern Internet is machines talking to other machines to gather information for other machines. No-one on the Web really knows each other anymore. Gemini, Gopher and other more intimate protocols hope to reverse that trend.
In the same vein, the scripts I use to maintain my capsule, such as generating my feed files, are all written by hand. I control exactly how they work, and they only serve to tidy up a few tedious ends, while I create the core log entries and shared files manually. I want to always keep it that way.
A part of me, however, is fascinated by the completely manual aspect of the telephone switchboard. I like things I can physically tinker with, and I like when that tinkering serves as a way to connect to other people. That might be where my interest in SDR and other forms of amateur radio come from: the idea of using tools I physically build and manipulate myself to communicate with people all over the world.
I wonder what sort of silly projects could be done with an old switchboard. I picture systems that in a way mirror telephony. Imagine a CGI script with "slots" that can request different pages, and those pages are sent to each "slot" based on the physical connections made on the switchboard. Another possibility could be to connect users in small two-way chats using connections on a switchboard.
Of course, such a venture wouldn't be something I could sit by my computer and station 24 hours a day. But in the world of amateur radio, it's common to share online or via other means when one is usually on the air. It would be fun, perhaps, to set up a chat system controlled by switchboard and run it for a few hours one or two nights a week.
I enjoy not just human interaction, but human interaction which is itself empowered by humans. If any community were to embrace such a paradigm again, I feel like the small Web would be the first to do it.
I've got some ideas to consider.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-30]