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I was recently talking with flipperzero (aka. userfxnet), and I realized how often I pop in and out of communities. Some of the interactions that I've had with others I miss, and some periods of time were particularly rough for me. I got through them, and some particular people that I've interacted with have helped me through them.
I joined Circumlunar Space in 2018. According to the modified date metadata of the txt file of my first phlog post on gopher, it was 9/19/2018, so 5 years ago. I remember interacting with solderpunk, yargo, and tfurrows the most on there. They were some of the kindest people I knew on the internet at the time, and they made me feel quite welcome. I still remember some important moments in my life that these three people helped me with, but particularly tfurrows and solderpunk.
Yargo created this chat program for circumlunar space called schat, and I hapened to have saved a copy of it just prior to when I left. This is the log when I first joined Zaibatsu Circumlunar Space. I hope solderpunk doesn't mine if I put this here, but this is his announcement in schat of my arrival:
[09-19,10:33Z] <solderpunk> Another new user! Krixano this time.
2 <solderpunk> Man, these new people move fast with their content.
And this is my first interaction joining schat, which happened a little less than 2 months later, as well as my first interactions with tfurrows and yargo:
[11-09,19:35Z] <krixano> Hello!
[11-09,19:53Z] <solderpunk> Ahoy, krixano! Sorry I missed you.
[11-09,19:55Z] <solderpunk> Hey!
[11-09,19:55Z] <krixano> Hi. I was just reading some stuff in the bbs.
[11-09,19:56Z] <solderpunk> Great! Glad to see you were able to ssh in no worries.
[11-09,19:57Z] <solderpunk> Please post freely on the BBS, don't be worried about "necrobumping" or anything like that.
[11-09,19:58Z] <solderpunk> It'd be really great to see local social traffic pick up.
[11-09,19:58Z] <krixano> I have to go to class in 3 minutes, so I will be back in a little over an hour.
...
[11-09,20:51Z] <krixano> I'm back from class
...
[11-09,22:02Z] <tfurrows> welcome to the party kixano :)
[11-09,22:03Z] <tfurrows> I made lunch and then slept for a few hours... I guess he's not the only one kind of sick
[11-09,22:05Z] <krixano> Hello. Thanks!
...
[11-10,23:48Z] <yargo> hey krixano
[11-10,23:48Z] <krixano> Hello!
[11-10,23:49Z] <yargo> Howdy, nice to meet you synchronously. ^-^
I didn't do a ton on the Zaibatsu Circumlunar pubnix, but I did bring over my line editor project, called Edim, and I started a new project that I never got to finish. It was a text-based game that was meant to be sandbox open-world, kinda like Minecraft in text-mode.
Being on Zaibatsu Circumlunar Space was a very important step on my journey. It was the first place I feel like I really connected with people. Solderpunk was the very first person I ever came out to, and not long after I came out in the BBS on Circumlunar. This was a very big step for me that I needed to take.
This was the (honestly pretty terrible) poem I posted on the Circumlunar BBS, and it got a lot of support from the kind people that were on Circumlunar:
Scared
feeling each response
before they're even said
Reactions in my mind
the feelings just as real
I wasn't sure
why have I been unsure?
when there's a prevalence
representing
But there's backlash,
true feelings of my culture?
People are killed, jailed,
sent away, spat at
People are cut off,
unloved, hated
Many don't understand
the value of the reveal
It's not to brag, or to force, or prod
Rather,
to get support, to accept oneself,
to cope,
to express freely
just as everone else can
I've come to learn,
it's not my doing,
it's not my fault
I come into the world
as I am
from my past
from my genetics
Not all of my past
holds all weight
to who I am
I'm not "wrong"
because of it -
I know that now
I can't change
who I am
or pretend
I won't try to anymore,
the methods -
they're ineffective,
detrimental, aweful
and miss the point -
there's nothing wrong
with me
Disorders,
to be called so,
must affect,
significantly,
daily life activities,
some or all
I live my life
without direct affect
from who I am personally
It's taken me
many years
to realize, to admit,
to accept that...
I'm gay.
You can see in the poem that I was still not comfortable with coming out and that I felt the need to justify why I was posting this. The support I got was one of my highlights of being on Circumlunar.
While there were some trip-ups, I stayed on the Zaibatsu for a while. I don't quite remember when I left. I think I didn't save the latest version of my gopherhole, or it got misplaced perhaps, becuase there seems to be more things that are missing than what I'm seeing in the backup that I did find. Anyways, it doesn't matter. While I didn't do a whole lot at the zaibatsu, it was a very important step on my journey.
While being mostly inactive from the Zaibatsu, I continued to talk with tfurrows via my regular email. One of the things I still miss is talking with him. I guess over time we stopped emailing, me busy with university and him busy with life. I remember being on his TOPS-20 system, and that's when I got the idea to write one of my articles on Unix Shell History which I originally posted on Handmade Network, but then moved to a different site. I believe I took it offline for now, but I may put it back on geminispace soon. I also was on sloum's Colorfield space for a brief moment, and yargo's Ryumin's Dome, which had git hosting, iirc. I wrote some stories and poetry on Ryumin's Dome under an alias. I believe I deleted that account, but I'm sure I have a backup of the files saved somewhere. I still have tfurrows' book that he wrote and published, Professor Spindlebrock's Little Blue Book of Traveling Spells, as well as another book that he sent me. I never got a chance to send him anything, which I always regret when I think back on this. Anyways, his book is still right there on my shelf.
I was involved in gemini somewhat earlier on, although I do what I tend to always do, which is pop in and out of different communities. I created the Pon.ix.tc server, officially named "Ponix" (the multics server was named "Ponics" to match the spelling of Multics). I believe it was one of the first 50 gemini servers to exist. You can still see this original name used in this capsule, although I recently changed the link text to it.
Multics Tutorials and Docs (Ponics Multics Server)
I ran the dps8m Multics emulator on that server. I also had someone I knew from online join that server, but to get to that, I have to explain my involvement in the ZeroNet Project:
Probably just before I joined Circumlunar, I started browsing on ZeroNet, which was this p2p distributed web protocol that acted much like bittorent, but it also stored user data in json files that, when updated and distributed accross the network, would be imported into a local database. These json files were stored in sub-directories to websites, but they were cryptographically signed not by the website creator, but by each user. It was a really cool system that just needed a lot of polish to become really good.
My work within the ZeroNet community consisted of creating tons of websites for it, including a Medium-like alternative for ZeroNet which I called ZeroMedium. I also created a YouTube alternative called KxoVid, ZeroExchange, which was like Stack Exchange, and KxoBlock, a blocklist sharing site. My first website for ZeroNet, however, was Important Zites, which was mostly a curated list of zites. I then added the ability to add submissions from users. And then later I created a new version of Important Zites that was a search engine that would search based on metadata of the zites. The search querying code was written in JavaScript and in SQL for the SQLite database that ZeroNet had integrated in it. The code worked for ZeroNet, but it doesn't work for Gemini at all, and so when I started working on AuraGem Search, I looked at that older code from Important Zites to see if I could use anything. I did some experiments and found that it mostly didn't work so well. That's when I switched to using FTS.
Anyways, continuing on with ZeroNet, I also collaborated with some people to help make p2p chat and p2p video livestreaming work. That was a very fun project that turned out to be really cool because we got full video livestreaming to work in a p2p setting. I also helped to produce a plugin that would allow one to make gopherholes ontop of ZeroNet's base system - yes, we got p2p gopherholes working. Along with one of the people that I collaborated with for the p2p livestreaming, we both then made KxoId, which was a new ID system for ZeroNet that used p2p and some consensus algorithm stuff.
I remember that all of us that worked on the p2p chatroom and p2p livestreaming had a Matrix group that we would talk on a lot. It was pretty fun. The final thing I did for the ZeroNet project was help it transition from GPLv2 to GPLv3 due to unintentional licensing violations. This was a particularly rough time of dealing with spammers and some not-so-nice people who kept attacking the ZeroNet developer and us with conspiracy theories, slurs, etc. It was an awful time, and it was the last straw that made me leave ZeroNet for good (mostly). Unfortunately, about a year or two later ZeroNet became more quiet, a lot of the people that I knew on there left, and the developer stopped working on the project.
After I left ZeroNet for good, I went on to make Ponix. I was already watching the Gemini protocol closely during the tail-end of my work with ZeroNet, and I mentioned it a few times to some of the people I knew on ZeroNet. I also joined the Gemini mailinglist (I still have a backlog of some of the mailing list emails on my protonmail, afaik - I don't believe I deleted any of them). I wrote a lot of code for Ponix, and started up that Multics server. A lot of my work was on creating a YouTube and Sefaria proxies for Gemini and Gopher. I don't recall a whole lot of this period in time because I believe my raspberry pi's SD card got corrupted and a year or so later I had to rewrite all of that code for Gemini (I never rewrote the code for Gopher).
So... I started over. Ponix eventually became AuraGem, which was a name I originally came up with in the Geminauts XMPP server that benk had. I joined the Geminauts after first finding out about benk's gemini podcast (gemcast):
I really enjoyed talking with benk and mbays on there, as well as mieum when he would pop in. It was really cool being on there and getting to see the brilliance that is mbays. Check out mbay's gemini capsule if you haven't yet!
He created some of the first multiplayer games within geminispace. The site is called the Simple Gemini Game Server.
sggs: Simple Gemini Game Server
He is also the developer of the diohsc client, and I see that while I was away from Gemini for a year he also created the Collaborative Directory of Geminispace!
cdg: Collaborative Directory of Geminispace
As for the other part of the story: I joined the Handmade Network around 2018 or so. My time being on Handmade Network was some of the most stressful. I found a few good people on there, and I liked some of the ideas that were coming out of the community, but looking back on my time there makes me realize a lot of the pain and loneliness that I felt, the pain of not belonging, of being forced into something I'm not, of being surrounded by arrogance and a particular mindset that encourages mysogyny and hate towards LGBTQ+ people. I would talk more about my interactions on there, but there's only a few highlights of my time on there, and I'll make it short:
1. I wrote several projects while interacting in the community, including EdimCoder/Edim, which was mostly started there, Avram, Orpheus, Paled, and Tempus Calendar. Most of these projects are no longer being worked on, except one. Perhaps the pain and loneliness I felt there seeped into the projects, and I just couldn't work on projects that were associated with the community.
2. When I left Handmade Network, I was still interacting with the Odin community. Odin was/is a programming language that was made by someone from the Handmade Network community, and so a lot of the hatred that came from the Handmade Network community seeped into the Odin community. Most of the mods of the Odin community were people from the Handmade Network community. Their private cultic Discord server, again, shares many of the same members. There were some good people on the server, and some people that I believe were integrous. Odin is still my favorite programming language, and I still develop in it, but I no longer interact with its Discord community - it's too painful for me. I did do some very small stuff for Odin, like being helped by someone to get Odin working on FreeBSD, but they are pretty much negligent contributions, especially now that most of the code has been rendered obsolete and replaced. Anyways, I'll stop it at this.
Now that I've finally graduated University, I'm on a new journey now. I no longer go by krixano.
Contact Info: christian.seibold32@outlook.com