DIGGING A NEW GOPHERHOLE FOR MYSELF

Well I finally gave up on Aussies.space coming back any time soon, 
even though Fosslinux did confirm that Gopher hosting is still 
intended for it. I'm not sure why he couldn't have set all the 
server configuration up on a local machine and then only needed to 
switch over the configuration once it was ready, but I guess if I 
want my hosting run my way I should host it myself. Actually it's 
_really_ tempting to just set a Gopher server running on my VPS, in 
many ways it would be easier, but it also makes identifying me 
trivial. Using a separate VPS or at least IP address would help, 
but then it becomes more work for me and still far less anonominity 
given that governments could easily access VPS subscription IDs.

I have also flirted with the idea of just keeping this to myself. I 
am quite tempted by the idea that life is all just a dream, and 
it's easiest of all not to presume the existance of the funny 
people who write to me out of this computer. Couldn't they all just 
be a simulation? Hallucination? He stares into a glass tube 
energised to dangerously high voltage, and hallucinates people from 
across the globe speaking to him, and sometimes he talks back.

But to believe in nothing is to believe in everything, and I'm not 
that open-minded, so I might as well conclude that there really is 
someone out there to talk to. So I surveyed my options, and indeed 
since Eyeblea.ch stopped resolving right at the time that 
Aussies.space went down for reinvention it seems there isn't any 
Australian gopher hosting available for free at the moment. I did 
track down the creator of Eyeblea.ch to this Gemini capsule here:
gemini://duncan.bayne.id.au/

It's curious that he doesn't mention it anywhere there (at least 
not obviously), but the same guy did announce Eyeblea.ch here a 
couple of years ago:
https://lobste.rs/s/yz9qrp

I'm starting to think that the people who run these things are 
weird, but then again I think everyone is weird. Anyway perhaps 
it's a good thing that it went down before I wasted time setting 
things up there, if sign-ups were even still working.

So I applied for a Tilde.club account a couple of days ago, and am 
waiting for it to go through, if it does. As I whinged about 
earlier, I was posting to their NNTP server until they recently 
denied posting to people without an account. So if I get an account 
then I can post there again too. Except looking into the details it 
seems that really I can't, because their wiki says you need to use 
encryption for the log-in (presumably for the sake of security, 
though I think it's overboard), and Tin only added support for 
encrypted NNTP connections in the latest release, so I'll have to 
compile that myself. Plus now it's another damn internet service 
requiring encryption, so another bit of the internet with an expiry 
date (see 
2020-05-31The_Best_Thing_About_Gopher_is_that_its_Unencrypted.txt). 
Anyway I'll probably stop grumping eventually and run it on my 
Internet Client like all the other horrible internet software that 
insists on doing such nonsense, but I'm temped not to just because 
NNTP, like Gopher, was one protocol where I thought I'd be safe 
from forced encryption.

Then of course I'll have to decide what I do if Aussies.space comes 
back. I do hate broken links, but keeping everything synced and 
working across two servers is a pain as well. This is where HTTP 
redirects are nice, although they're not used enough (I don't think 
HTTP redirects were possible for users to set up at Aussies.space 
either). I think I'll just archive the Tilde.club copy with a 
banner at the top of each gophermap announcing the move back to 
Aussies.space, then it doesn't look like I just stopped posting, 
like many other phlogs do when their authors move elsewhere. Or if 
Tilde.club just dies then I guess it's tough luck. It's been around 
a while, but then Grex has been around a lot longer and it's 
shutting down, oh, huh, today.

Anonymous emails are easy to set up. I did think about running a 
script on my Internet Client which fetches emails from 
freethoughtsforgopher@yandex.com every day, and have it respond to 
emails with a particular Subject header just to say the current 
location of The Free Thinker on gopherspace. Would anyone use it 
though? No. I mean nobody's emailed me there about being offline 
anyway. OK, move on.

Oh I am wasting far too much effort thinking about all this. Maybe 
I should just decide that you're all a dream and there's no point 
talking back to you. But that's wasting time now too. No, I'll go 
hang out the washing and then move stuff around in the shed so I 
can try to fit my work cage / car servicing platform in there 
because getting permission to build a new shed around it really is 
too much trouble/expense.

 - The Free Thinker