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On phlog revisions and the small internet (RE: visiblink)

Entered in vim on RPoJ via ssh from iPad w/ external keyboard

20190125

In his latest

phost

, visiblink puts out a request for the prevailing take on revising phlog entries. Here is my $0.02 -- I typically allow myself to make revisions for about the first hour. These are limited to formatting and spelling corrections. After that, the phost lives its permanent life. If I particularly regret something I have written, the entire phost gets deleted. If it is something that has taken on a life of its own, then deleting would not be honest. In this case a follow up entry explaining what I would have edited is in order.

IMHO, this approach is in keeping with my personal philosophy and with that of the small internet as espoused elsewhere. I just want to add, that I do whole-heartedly agree with the notion of the small internet as put forth by spring, et al. I would like to draw a distinction between scraping content like LX'ers into gopherspace, and creating interfaces to things like Wikipedia. One is bringing a foreign community in without our participation, and the other is a front-end to raw information. Maybe this is just to rationalize my creation of the Gutenberg front-end but it seems different.

The part where I am torn is that I used the LX'ers front-end, and I use the Hacker News gopher front-end more than the WWW site. On most world wide web sites, I lurk instead of participate. So scraped content is the same for me as being in a web browser. On hacker news, for example, I have commented only once, a calculated comment to raise my karma to exactly 2 so I could link it to keybase. Back in the 90s I had dozens of troll accounts on /. -- then the novelty of participating in a large discussion forum wore off.

I think, after reading what I have written, I am advocating for a middle ground. I do not want to have :70 turned into a religion. In the end, we are a collective of independent servers who do what we wish. This is important. More so than the feeling of any one of us. The platform excludes most badness by its tech -- no JavaScript, no cookies, no popups, no redirects... content is avoidable by decision. On gopher there is room for communists, Nazis, incels, trans, even bronies. I do not have to visit what I do not like, and this extends to scraped content.