💾 Archived View for lesogorov.site › glogs › 2303 › maiden-voyage.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 17:40:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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So I've left smol.pub, ditched my old pseudonym, Sud0nim, and adopted a new one, Lesogorov.
Sud0nim, wasn't doing it for me anymore. I came up with it in 2020 and had been using it since then, but I didn't feel ever truly tied to it. I thought it was a fun play on the word "pseudonym", while incorporating my interest in Linux with the "sudo" command. It also didn't have any ties to any identifying information to make it fairly anonymous. Pretty quickly I realized I was far from the first person to select that as my online handle, which resulted in me needing to make it "Sud0nim" or "Sudon1m" or "Sud0n1m", which just pushed me further away from the name. Plus when I wrote my piece on the struggles of being anonymous online, I got a very reassuring email from Ploum that reassured me not to worry so much about being tied to my online identity. This diminished my liking of the whole pseudo-anonymous aspect to the name. So when I decided to spin up my own Gemini server, I got the domain sud0nim.online and got it all ready for publishing, but stopped and started from scratch. If I wanted to put work into this it ought to be a name I feel tied to. I chose "Lesogorov" a Russian patronymic for "Son of the forested mountains", it's not a very common last name in Russia so it's unique enough for me, and it represents my interest and connection to nature, especially mountains and thick forest. Plus it reflects my interest in Russian culture and the language, and in Russian cursive it is easy to distinguish each letter, which can't be said of all names/words.
Smol.pub was a good place for me to start out at, but it was never my home. I chose to sign up there and not deal with the hassle of hosting my own server when I first started using Gemini. When I signed up it seemed like there was a wide variety of people who posted, but besides a few regulars who were there prior to me joining and a couple newcomers, a lot of the current posters are of the same identitarian persuasion that I came to Gemini to flee. Of course I want them to have a place where they can post freely, just as anyone should be able to, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't hold back my tongue at times because I didn't want to ruffle someones feathers enough to the point of sending an email to the host and them deeming me not a good fit for the server and booting me out. I know this really is assuming the worst, but as I used to run in these hyper-online identitarian circles I know how these things can escalate. I just wanted a place truly my own that I could do whatever I wanted with. Plus the name smol.pub really started to irk me, "smol", "pupper", "lil beans", and all that sort of online "wholesome" baby-speak has become a huge pet-peeve of mine. Typing smol.pub into the address bar was always followed by an eye-roll on my part. Additionally I always felt limited in only posting at most once a day, despite wanting to post more, because I didn't want to clog up the feed. I know this is silly but it's just how my mind works with shared online spaces.
I'll still read from there and I always look forward to posts from regulars, especially Eph, but my time there is now over and now I must leave.