💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › ssb captured on 2024-08-18 at 19:18:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
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(Or rather, lack of experience.)
Secure Scuttlebutt is an utterly charming idea like messages in a bottle. You send stuff and get to know people in a way that feels disconnected from the normal public internet. The idea is that as you’re walking around with your phone in your pocket, or sitting at the pub or whatever, you can exchange data and when you get home you can look at what you harvested.
They explain it much better than I can.
In the past I’ve used a similar (proprietary) app for the Nintendo 2DS / 3DS. It was fun, although I stopped using it even before the 2DS broke; you need the wifi on and that eats batteries.
I installed SSB, this was three years ago or so, and for a few months ago I kept a “sickness diary”, writing more stream-of-consciously about my experiences being sick. I needed a new topic since unlike here on Gemini, they discourage bihosting. They ideally want you to put stuff there that’s fresh and isn’t available anywhere else.
But I don’t have a phone. I could maaaybe schlep my tablet down to the laundry room and hope for one or two people in there but I don’t wanna drag the tablet around (and keeping it on!) just for that. And it probably woulda broken in my detergent bag or as I was schlepping clothes around. I kinda like having it be mostly an “at-home–only” device, I need it for work and I don’t want it to get broken. And this was when I was at my most sickest (or so I hope). I could barely leave bed, let alone the building.
There are plenty of services, virtual pubs where you can sync up your stuff remotely but I didn’t wanna do that, for me the entire charm was the whole physical exchange aspect of SSB. I’m glad those services exist of course but that’s not what I wanted do to.
And in the end I chickened out and unpublished all those posts, a dozen or so. They felt a li’l too personal for something that can never be edited or amended (another drawback of SSB). I could do that because they had never been picked up by any other client. I’m not sure I even saved them as text files somewhere else.