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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-17)
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posted: Thu Dec 9 19:53:44 UTC 2021
originally on soviet.circumlunar.space telem bbs
I don't really plan on leaving CLS, Gemini, or the smolnet. But the Fediverse at large? Probably. Here's why.
I often think about the fading of the elves into the West, out of Middle Earth, when I think about my own interactions with communities online. They largely seem as ephemeral, as fleeting, and as potentially myopic and small in my eyes as the world of Men must have seemed to an Elf that had within their own lifetime witnessed everything from the Fall of Gondolin to the War of the Last Alliance.
But as I reflect on this now, I also have a few revelations/confessions to
make.
One: I'm really not a fan of a lot of the discourse and discussion going on in the Fediverse. Fosstodon.org once felt like a home but it frankly doesn't anymore and that saddens me greatly. Things are so angry, so vitriolic, and focused with such a narrow mind toward software freedom at any and all costs (including at the expense of alienating people from the very idea with a mean response online to an honest question from an outsider), that I honestly have trouble identifying with the community anymore.
Two: This isn't a dig on the entire community. Just some of the loud, angry and decidedly uneducated ones that choose to spread anger and misinformed opinions instead of meaningful data and good, topical discourse.
Three: I really don't plan on contributing a lot to most FOSS projects right now both as a result of the kind of politics and ideologies and anger floating around, as well as just because I find the constant need to reinvent the wheel with a different library or a new, better framework confounding and exhausting. I'd rather we centralize effort into a handful of projects on a single OS and call it a day after doing a damn good job at making it meaningfully usable for all parties interested, instead of a wide and disparate group of software that's famously spaghetti'd together (Liiinuuuuxxxxxxx) through package managers, git repo's, and forks upon forks of different clients, servers, protocols and systems that were originally conceived decades ago.
If the Unix/Linux philosophy is to "do one thing and do it really good", I can't help but wonder where a -lot- of the FOSS communities surrounding Linux and somewhat the BSD's have gone wrong. They do lots of things kinda okay, some things really good, and others profoundly bad. I do my best to write code that does its job well and exacts its purpose with clarity and precision. Either I'm barking up the wrong trees or I'm having trouble finding that same kind of sentiment in the computer world right now. Maybe I'm just crazy? I hope so. It would be better than the alternative of everybody else being crazy.
The crux of this issue and how it relates to Circumlunar Space, though, is that I -created- the moniker of "wholesome donut" FOR the fediverse. It was my alias for my initially experimental foray into the world of Mastodon instances and a weird, alternative side of the internet I had only been dimly aware of before. Now obviously great things have come of it. I really enjoy CLS and I have no intention of leaving it. But I do find myself in a conundrum: if the entire reason for being of "wholesomedonut" as a name and presence online is basically being.. obsoleted? by the onset of pointless drama and conflict where there should rightfully be none, does the moniker and presence really need to exist still?
Hence my post. I'm genuinely considering sunsetting most of my "wholesomedonut" stuff on the web. But I've kinda gotten attached to both the literal name and certainly to the ponderously quiet and slow community that is CLS: still a lovely and well-needed island of sanity in a world full of ever-changing norms and high-speed data.
So at any rate... wholesomedonut may disappear from the world at large. But the pastry will live on in small places like this, and perhaps others spread throughout this web of floaty electrons and invisible binary fluff that we all seem to be so attached to nowadays.
Hope everybody's doing well. I'm doing A-OK.
I don't do comments on gemini posts. Throw me an email if you're curious or have questions. Or slide into my Matrix DM's.. don't be surprised when I ignore you for a day or two, I don't always check either of them more than once or twice a day.
external email: wholesomedonut at tuta dot io
matrix: at wholesomedonut colon matrix dot org