Gopher resiliency (circumlunar.space), 11/14/2019
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I  was around  in the  BBS  days, but  for whatever  reason,
gopher never got on my radar. I went from the dial-up BBS to
straight to dial-up internet using  http on the www. For me,
gopher came a few years ago,  by chance while I was fiddling
with an old DOS packet driver setup.

What a  world to discover! I  jumped in with both  feet, but
without much thought.  I started with SDF,  and branched out
from there  to grex  and beyond.  I think  I have  maybe 6-8
gopher holes on various systems  at this point. There may be
more than that.

Now I'm starting to think about resiliency, about my ability
to  adjust and  recover, to  roll  with changes,  in all  my
gopher activity. Perhaps I don't  have any, and maybe that's
OK.  Perhaps  some of  my  gopher  holes  can just  die  off
quietly, and I can come and go as I please with the others.

It's nice  to know that  this whole  thing is small-  as in,
Small Internet (credit  can float where it needs  to for the
term, I can't recall who wrote on it now... spring, that was
it[1]). It's simple, it's cozy, it's non-permanent.

Wait... was non-permanent part of Spring's thing, or is that
a Circumlunar thing?

In any  case, I was  thinking about resiliency. Part  of it,
for me, is  backups. I have a backup of  my grex content. As
they have gone  down and up and down, and  have continued to
have  issues  with  gopher  server  performance,  it's  been
comforting to know  that my data is here at  my house, where
it belongs,  and not just  stuck somewhere. I've  moved some
things here, and  I'll move more things. Maybe  I'll take up
again at grex, I have no idea.

Another part  of it is letting  go. I'm not a  Buddhist, but
it's valuable  to me  to be  able to  let go.  It's valuable
because  I'm incapable  of  clinging  solidly to  everything
forever. I have to be OK with letting go, because letting go
is part of my reality.

So, backups and letting go; so  far, two things in some kind
of metaphysical opposition. But I  think they're part of the
balance of resiliency. I keep my backups, and I move my data
around,  because it  makes me  feel like  I can  hold on  to
things. I  accept when  things are  lost, or  projects don't
work out, or  a gopher hole that I was  excited about dies a
little, because I feel good letting go.

All of this is just to  meander, because that's the mood I'm
in. Also, I've been thinking  that some of the server admins
have got to be wondering what the point is of hosting my old
data if  I'm not  really going to  continue what  I started.
Heck, it's time to be out  with it, to air my dirty laundry.
These are the sites I'm thinking about:

[] gopher://vernunftzentrum.de:70/1/tfurrows/index.gph
[] gopher://dome.circumlunar.space:70/1/~wells/
[] gopher://cosmic.voyage:70/1/ships/Xero Carbon Wells
[] gopher://colorfield.space:70/1/~tfurrows

That felt  good. For whatever  reasons, these sites  are the
ones that I'm  not keeping up with. I'm tepid  about some of
them, and passionate about others.  I don't want to let them
go, but  I don't want to  mistreat the admins either,  who I
know and respect.

What would you do in my shoes? What do you do in your shoes?

[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt