Subj : Bizarrely, Vertrauen might be my best option for socializingintermittently online
To   : Main.General
From : Ash
Date : Thu Sep 07 2023 12:25 am

I came to realise recently that modern day online does not work well for 
my use case. I have been getting into sailing and quickly found that a 
lot of software, social systems are utterly terrible if you have 
intermittent connectivity. Plus, when roaming, you have various caps of 
bandwidth or required to pay some rather stupidly high rates against 
data usage.

People have been strongly suggesting to me I should use software like 
Discord, Telegram, Reddit app etc. But, if you've ever tried to use that 
software offline, you quickly discover that they barely cache any data 
for offline usage. If you write messages to people, you better not turn 
off your device or the drafts are gone.

Older Internet was somewhat better for this situation considering there 
was a time you do dial up, then retrieve your e-mails, conference/posts, 
send any queued up items and disconnect immediately after. Then go 
through stuff offline.

Vertrauen supporting stuff like NNTP and having gateways to various 
networks is pretty much letting me do that today, which is pretty 
awesome! I'm tunneling the traffic over a compressed SSH tunnel, which 
both helps reduce my traffic/speeds it up but also helps against MitM on 
the more less secure networks.

Being able to download all these messages, then go offline, so while at 
sea when I have time to spare to be able to go through it, read, reply 
as wanted, and submit when near civilisation is great.

.