Gopher as a Neighborhood
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Created on 2021-01-19
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First of all, welcome to my first new file of 2020... Wait, 2021? Where the heck
did last year go?! Well, anyway. Welcome to a new year! I got a response from
~jtecca on my a post I wrote for the WWW[1] last year[2], and it kind of hit
me, that gopherspace, and particularly, the gopherspace we have here in the
tildeverse is very personal, and much more interesting than any other type of
social media out there. ~jtecca found me, not because I was some super famous
person that everyone is looking for, and not because some algorithm decided he
should see my post. And it wasn't even because we have any friends in common.
We just happened to have chosen the same neighborhood.

Going by the number of home directories, ~.institute has around 400 users.
That's not a huge number, but when you're here, you[3] feel as though you should
see what others are doing. It's few enough that you feel you can know who every-
one is, and take an extra interest in what's going on. I love popping on ssh,
and using w(1) to see who's online, then checking them out with finger(1). When
I check out the directory, there's already an interest in the new updates, for
no other reason than these are my neighbors.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, or if there's even any point. It
just struck me as something you don't get anywhere else. Maybe it's more like
a BBS (Duh) or forum. It's still social, but without the likes, and retweets.
It's still screaming into the void, but once in a while, maybe someone is
screaming into the same void. That's kind of cool.

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Footnotes:

[1] gopher://tilde.institute/0/~rdh/things/send-email.md

[2] Dang it, that was 2019. Seriously, what did I do during pandemic?

[3] Of course, by "you" I mean "me".