Hello, and welcome to my first Gopher journal post, whoever happens
to be reading.

Over the last weekend, I finally took some time to explore the
tiny communities on Gopher and Gemini, and it just felt great.
Nostalgic, sure -- I immediately felt like I was back on dial-up
BBSes -- but also beneficial.  Computers are astonishingly fast, but
we slow down access to information with JavaScript, surveillance,
and ads.  We hand it all over for free to for-profit corporations,
where anxiety, misinformation, and bottomless distraction are added
to the mix to keep us coming back for more.

In the words of Bo Burnham, "Can I interest you in everything, all
of the time?"

I put my terminal into full screen mode, so no GUI remained.  I was
alarmed when I pulled up my first few Gopher pages, because for a
moment I couldn't stop my eyes from darting all over the screen,
looking for the graphics, the sizzle, the firehose of notifications
and updates that weren't there.  I had to sort of reprogram myself
to the way I used to browse the internet in my Amiga days.  After I
calmed down, I found it very relaxing.

The web is here to stay, of course, but it doesn't _have_ to
be the sole source of information on the internet.  However,
alternatives won't flourish without participation.  So, here I am.
I'm purposely not mirroring this content on the web, because I want
you to participate too.

For anyone interested, I brought this server up pretty quickly on my
Ubuntu VPS like so:

    $ sudo dpkg -i python-simpletal_4.1-9_all.deb 
    $ sudo dpkg -i pygopherd_2.0.18.5_all.deb 
    $ sudo systemctl enable pygopherd 
    $ sudo systemctl restart pygopherd

This will serve files out of `/var/gopher`, which will be owned by
gopher/gopher on the standard port 70.

I added myself to the gopher group so I could work out of that
directory:

    $ sudo usermod -a -G gopher stevenf

Beyond that, you'll want to read about the gophermap format, which
looks a little weird at first, but is effectively just plaintext served
out of a directory structure with specially formatted lines for links.