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Re: Email, Mastodon, Text-Based Websites, and Gemini
In their post, winter writes about the nostalgia, simplicity, and escapism of text-based interfaces and tells the story of how they used an old secondhand server as a dedicated text-based FreeBSD machine.
There's something wonderful about text. If you're reading this, in Lagrange or kristall or amfora, you get it. No amount of twice-a-decade braying about how video is the future will ever convince me of such; I don't care what's on TikTok, I don't care about the latest challenge or trend, about teenagers talking to the camera in super-quick cuts, I just want to read things. And if this describes you, you understand how a page full of text and links is transporting, whether that's here or on gopher or the small web. Yes, I was a kid in the pre-Pentium age. I remember the early days of the internet, but also the BBS era (flamewars and romance at 2400!), and the era before that, where I swapped disks with my friends. All this to say there's comfort in the familiar, but also clarity in sparseness, in that way you're free to experience things at your own pace, in your own way.
I've been thinking about doing something similar.
I'm tired of modern computing. Its complicated and distracting and frustrating; it feels like a means to an end rather than something fun and creative and exploratory. I like the idea of having a machine stripped to its bare essentials; something that I sit down and use intentionally for specific tasks rather than a glass pacifier that interrupts and monopolizes my attention.
I started feeling this way when I booted a Windows XP VM a few months ago to play and old video game with a friend. Having not used XP since I was a kid (I'm pretty young), I was struck by the simplicity. I was hit with a wave of secondhand nostalgia from an era of computing I barely experienced.
Since I started using Linux back in 2014, I've been in love with text-based interfaces. Coworkers twice my age call me old-fashioned for using Vim as my IDE.
However, as Linux transitioned from being a hobby to my daily driver, I started to stray from the Old Ways. I don't use CMUS as my audio player; I use Spotify. I don't use xplr or ranger or vifm as my file manager; I use Nautilus. I don't use uzbl as my web browser; I use Chromium. I don't use i3 as my window manager, I use Gnome. And so on.
I want to set up a Linux time machine so I can go back and recapture that sense of discovery and wonder I had when I first started using Linux, and I think the way to do that is with a dedicated machine with a terminal as its only interface. I'm even considering getting a CRT if I have the space for it someday.
And in the spirit of permacomputing, I'd like to find a secondhand machine I can use. I must have at least one friend with an old Thinkpad in their closet.
Computing is stressful; I need an escape.
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