💾 Archived View for samsai.eu › gemlog › 2022-08-06-heartbeat-signal.gemini captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:24:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Been almost a year since I updated anything here. Probably the latest change was when I pulled in changes to gmnisrv at the end of last year. Almost surprised the server is still running, I guess I configured a systemd unit file for it and thus the server came back up every time I restarted the box.
I managed to stay fairly consistent on here from May of 2020 to September 2021 and basically after that my activity here just crashed. It's very likely the silence would have continued even longer had I not played some Last Call BBS on my Owncast stream yesterday. Some people talked in chat about BBS's and Gopher and that made me think back to Gemini and this little capsule of mine that has been drifting through cyberspace dormant and essentially on reserve power.
I got into Gemini more or less at the culmination of my techno-minimalism phase. I'd gotten annoyed with "bloat" and considered the WWW a massive disaster. I ran i3 and Sway because "muh minimalism" etc. So, obviously Gemini with its simplicity suited my hipsterism at the time to a T.
There was definite value I got from browsing and contributing to the content here. I read through the kinds of posts and found people whom I would have likely never even encountered on the big WWW in the first place. And to this day I've received more responses to things I've written on this capsule in an obscure corner of the Internet than on the things I've published on my blog. The slow trickle of simple text was a nice change of pace for the endlessly scrolling torrent elsewhere.
Towards the end of 2021 a couple of things changed though. Firstly, I got hired to a permanent position after my trainee contract and since then I've been busy-busy. This meant that I had to start fairly evaluating and accepting mainstream technology solutions, including the web tech stack. So, the techno-minimalist hipsterism had to make way for more pragmatism. The combination of being busy and no longer having the same obsessive appreciation for small things meant I didn't really write anything here and also stopped reading things.
It also doesn't really help that I guess I am not really the greatest content creator in the first place, nor have I figured out which content to put where. I've got my Mastodon account (ditched Twitter a while back, particularly because it's turning into Muskville) but most of my posts there are just the occasional replies or livestream announcements. I tried to put a bit more work towards my blog but even there I'm somewhat sporadic. I sometimes get ideas but they end up being scrapped because I get uncertain about where to post them and often they get struck down by sheer laziness. It could also be that maybe I don't have anything to say, who knows?
Well, thanks to the livestream yesterday I decided to reinstall Elpher and send out at least one heartbeat signal into the Geminispace. It seems at least some people are still holding the fort on Spacewalk and CAPCOM, so I'll probably have a scan through what people have been doing in the meantime. Don't know how things are going to continue after that, but considering it costs me nothing to keep the capsule at least online, I may as well. Might switch to another server software at some point though. Stargazer looks potentially quite nice.