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I see that we're having a discussion about the smol internet and what it's for on Gemini, which is good, though it's a little meta. Better than discussion of the protocol and software, not as good as discussion of other things from people's lives. I'm going to be replying to a whole bunch of people here, and I hope some of you manage to see it.
acdw: I want to be done with "social" media
This is where I picked up on the discussion. ACDW quotes a tweet thread from @millicentsomer@twitter.com, whoever that is. I've never been a very active Twitter user, largely because it seems like a place where you follow 'blue checks' rather than actually post things of your own. I dusted off my almost unused account during the primaries in order to contribute to the ratio'ing of neoliberal politicians and pundits, and I used it a bit for ground-level news of the ~~Bell Riots~~ George Floyd protests, but since then I haven't really been interested in it. I used to be active and probably pretty well-known on Weird Facebook (at least, under the name of my page), but I deleted my account two years ago. The thing is; I still love weird memes. I've stayed vaguely active on Reddit, and I used it a bit too much during the primaries, but lately, since /r/chapotraphouse was banned, again, I haven't been that interested. I'm completely addicted to the Fediverse, though. It's, like Reddit for acdw, a bad habit.
I do want to quote and discuss a few of the tweets acdw quoted:
Anyway. Sure, good-faith debate would be nice. Instead, the internet pressure-cooked rhetoric. Again: people can watch the same argument be conducted a million times in slightly different ways, and that's interesting, and a blessing, and a curse
It produced a kind of argumentative hyperliteracy. If you can predict every step of a controversy (including the backlash), it makes perfect sense to meta-argue instead--over what X *really* means, or implies, or what, down a road we know well, it confirms.
This isn't great. People talk past each other, assume bad faith. But it's not the fault of "illiberalism" that good faith is in short supply. And if that's where your analysis begins, I can't actually tell whether you're naive or trolling. And I'm no longer sure which is worse.
As someone who got completely addicted to Usenet in 1992, the year *before* the Eternal September, I have to say that *this is not actually new*. I really like the term "argumentative hyperliteracy". This is something that absolutely *did* exist on the early Internet. There were newsgroups dedicated almost entirely to arguments, and they were pretty much always the *same* arguments every week; I'm thinking of talk.origins and alt.atheism as the prime examples, but you'd see the same phenomenon on something as innocuous as comp.os.os2.misc. Someone comes in with an axe to grind, you've seen their arguments a hundred times before, and you can predict every twist of the flamewar. It maybe unfolded a little slower then (over the course of a week rather than a morning), but it was completely the same.
I do often say that no social media platform has ever really been any better than Usenet in any significant way, but I do want to avoid idealizing it. Really, the main advantage of Usenet over modern social media was the diversity of client implementations and the resulting development of features like killfiles and scorefiles.
Demifiend: Containment, Social Media, and the Dangers of Imitation
I will say that Twitter was exactly the worst corporate social media to imitate, and a lot of the flaws of the Fediverse come from the way Mastodon carefully imitated it. One I constantly harp on is the terrible way that post privacy and threading intersect: post privacy is a property of an individual post, and whether you can read a 'private' post depends on whether you are an allowed follower of the poster. But in a thread where multiple people are posting privately, different people who can all see the post that started the thread will have a completely different and gap-filled view of the thread itself...
I think this is the post that really expanded the discussion of the goals of the small internet (along with the following ones by left_adjoint). I'm mainly thankful for the link to Tools for Conviviality, though I had to convert it to epub for my purposes. I'm only on the introduction, and it seems maybe to be a work that is too much "of its time", but I'm looking forward to the rest of it, if I ever have the energy to read anything serious again.
OTRN asks for terminal games, but rules out Nethack as too complex.
I'd like to recommend Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (dcss). It's a roguelike very much in the Nethack tradition (as compared to the Moria tradition), but it's intended to not require the same obsessive reading of spoilers that Nethack does. It's not an *easy* game (I've only won a few times, and only with easy species/background combinations), but it's generally *fair* in a way that Nethack isn't, and the information you need to play it is there in the game interface. It also takes away a lot of the tedious bits that can make Nethack a slog.
It *does* have a tiles version, which *is* nicer than the terminal version, and practically everyone plays tiles. But I used to play it exclusively on terminal, and it was fine.
I agree with Demifiend that using the Linux console is completely overkill for terminal minimalism. My reasons, which overlap with theirs, but aren't identical:
One thing I have done, especially on my eeePC, is to run a full-screen terminal emulator window under a tiling window manager. Solves the above problems nicely, and is not much heavier than just running things on console. On my ThinkPad, I sometimes prefer to do all of my 'recreational' computing in a full-screen Cool-Retro-Term, but it is a bit of a battery hog, and on the eeePC it's too slow.
I do recommend using either screen or tmux, rather than relying on shell job control. Then you don't have to worry about your music player not being able to play backgrounded, for example.
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