💾 Archived View for canary.city › ~staticfanfare › gemlog › big-news.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:39:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Big News

Howdy, fellows! It's been a while. Let me fill you all in on what's happened these past few months.

First of all, happy 2024! It's been a pretty decent year for me so far and I hope things continue like this at the very least. I don't think I had any resolutions, other than just vague self-improvement. Needless to say I haven't made much progress.

Relating to what I said in the last post, chiyonet is now gone. Forever. This is now and will continue to be the only* place to find my uncut thoughts exposed for all the public to see. On the one hand, I'm sad to see what was certianly my favorite site on the entire World Wide Web die. On the other hand, it's nice to be able to focus on dumping my thoughts in one place without feeling like I'm abandoning the other.

I've got big plans. Plans large enough to be a blog post of its own, but I want to write about them today lest I don't feel like it later. I'm planning on opening canary.city to the public as a pubnix server. I've never done anything like this before, and there will be a lot of prep work involved in being able to make sure I can give shell access to people without too much trouble. However, it'll be worth it. I'm planning on this being my latest and greatest endeavor into building an online community.

Back when I left the Central Committee of the Avian International, I decided I was going to do something else. I'm not sure what I meant at the time, but this is going to be that thing. Back then, I said that the next thing would ideally be bigger and better, but that's only half-true. Of course I'd like canary.city pubnix to be even better than the Avintern, but I don't really want it to be bigger than that. There's a certain value in smaller communities that makes everything much more personal. I hope to embrace that wholeheartedly and cultivate a place where silly like-minded nerds can hang out and express themselves through the web and through Gemini, which brings me to my next topic.

I've set up a Gemini server using The Unsinkable Molly Brown, a server software written by solderpunk, creator and benevolent dictator of the Gemini protocol. I had some initial TLS certificate-related difficulties when setting it up, but once I got through that, I really started to enjoy using both it and Gemini itself. I have a capsulle there where you can read this as well!

First of all, I love gemtext. It's a wonderfully simple format that forces you to think only about content while leaving all the styling to the user's client. Secondly, I'm glad tilde page functionaly is built straight into Molly Brown, as that'll make it easy to give every canary.city user their own Gemini capsule. Browsing on Gemini is also a refreshing experience, as pages load quickly and essentially every site I've come across has been very cozy thanks to Lagrange's beautiful rendering of capsules. Even without that, gemtext still looks good in the terminal completely unrendered, so browsing geminispace without a GUI is still a pleasant experience.

That's all I have for today, I'm looking forward to writing here more (sorry about the big break) and generally spending more time on canary.city, hopefully with some of you soon enough! Goodnight.