Merry Christmas and thanks
--------------------------

Yikes, I've fallen off the gopher wagon to some extent, this entry being posted
with just two days to spare before a month of silence, my longest "non-streak"
yet.  It seems like madness that when I started this I entertained the idea of
writing daily except for Sundays.  Not only have I been bad at writing, but even
my reading has slipped.  I check the SDF phlogs pretty regularly, but at some
point in the business of the end of the year I let Bongusta slip off my radar
and probably missed some wonderful stuff.  I need to organise a better way of
keeping up with phlogs...

Anyway, first of all, Merry Christmas to those readers who celeberate it.

And to those readers who celebrate a plain-text internet, who celebrate
simplificty, minimalism and digital self reliance (which I can only imagine is
all of you), a sincere and heartfelt thank you.

A lot changed for me in 2017, including the hemisphere I live in.  But I think I
will remember it just as much for the changes that happened in my attitude
toward the internet.  After cutting myself off from Facebook, Reddit and some
other services, I kind of slid unintentionally into almost cutting myself off
from anything vaguely social on the internet entirely.  For years I had been
fretting the increasing resource intensiveness of the internet, its
centralisation into a small number of mega-silos, the ever expanding scope of
the surveillance-marketing-complex and the degeneration of discourse and even
news into the most repugnant and transparent clickbait.  I convinced myself that
I had to escape all this (and I stand by that), but I also convinced myself that
nobody else understood and genuinely cared about the problem, or close enough to
nobody else that there was no point at all in hoping for something better and
that any effort spent trying to build something better was in vain because it
would never be used by anybody other than me and three other strange people.

I no longer believe that last part, or at least not as strongly.  Some of my
optimism comes from the wider internet, including the mainstream success of
Mastodon (mainstream success, at least, by the usual standards of software with
any kind of ideological axe to grind), but first and foremost the things that
made me realise that I really am not alone were SDF and in particular the
phlogosphere.  So keep on doing exactly what you're doing, or better yet do it
more and faster.  I'll try to do the same!