Writing. Thinking. The small web.
There is something to be said about slowing down, not only in online interactions and community, but in life in general. Fluff starts to disappear, meaning and substance start rising to the top, and what once felt like bombardment begins to feel like clarity.
I do not know if this is simply part of aging, the result of being online long enough to remember when the internet felt different, or some combination of both. Probably both.
So I follow this guy in gemspace and really like his writings, his tidbits, and just an everyday guy kind of vibe. One of his gemlog posts (which he has tied to a lot of other small web things, including the web) I had heard about but never really tried until I signed up for an account at envs.net and got my firsthand look at BYOBU and tmux.
Sava gives some really good exmaples of how you can truly live inside the terminal.
So I tried it, and yeah, it's possible, but it seriously takes a reformatting of my brain. I think, like what everyone says about vim, if you use it regularly, it becomes second nature. I just need to ween myself off these other gadgets.
I'm going to keep spending time in the terminal. I think it is something that, while maybe nostalgic, actually could slowly become where I live all the time as I dig deeper into the small web.
Here are the links to his posts:
gemini://sava.rocks/blog/living-in-the-terminal/ gopher://sava.rocks:70/1/blog/ https://sava.rocks/blog/
In an age where headlines are crafted to provoke before they inform, media “jackals” thrive on fear, division, and emotional manipulation. This piece explores how propaganda spreads through outrage-driven narratives, shaping public opinion by repeating distortion until it starts to feel like truth. https://www.djoinerbooks.com/the-role-of-media-jackals-in-spreading-propaganda/ #MediaManipulation #Propaganda #CriticalThinking #DigitalMedia
https://www.djoinerbooks.com/the-role-of-media-jackals-in-spreading-propaganda/
I've been messing around with computers since before most of the folks reading this were born. I watched the internet go from a handful of university terminals and bulletin board systems to the bloated, JavaScript-everywhere, ad-tracked monster it is today. And somewhere along the way, a few people decided they'd had enough of all that noise and built something quieter. I'm talking about Gemini, Gopher, and some of the other small protocols living out on the edges of the web.
The problem was, if you wanted to browse any of that stuff, you needed a separate app for each one. Lagrange for Gemini. An old Gopher client for Gopher. Firefox or whatever for the regular web. That started to bug me. Why can't one browser just handle all of it?
So I built one. I called it Waystone Browser.
I like the small web the way it is. Quiet, a little rough around the edges, not trying to sell me anything every five seconds. It reminds me of how the internet used to feel before everything got optimized and polished into the same shape.
That said, there are a few things it could use without losing that spirit.
First, better ways to read. Not fancier, just smoother. If I’m following a handful of gemlogs, a couple Mastodon folks, maybe a Lemmy thread here and there, I shouldn’t have to juggle three different apps and a dozen tabs. Give me something simple that pulls it all together and lets me just sit and read. No ads, no tracking, no friction.
Second, a little more durability. Too many good sites just disappear. I get it, people move on, but it would be nice if there were easier ways to mirror or archive things so the good writing doesn’t vanish overnight. The small web has a memory problem.
Third, discovery that doesn’t feel like an algorithm breathing down your neck. I don’t want “recommended for you.” I want “here’s what someone else thought was interesting.” Old-school blogrolls, human-curated lists, maybe even random links that actually surprise you. Let people point to things they care about, not what performs well.
And maybe this is just me, but a bit more cross-connection wouldn’t hurt. Gemini, Gopher, the web, the fediverse all feel like neighboring towns that don’t always have good roads between them. You can get there, but it takes effort. Smoother bridges would go a long way.
None of this needs to be big or complicated. In fact, it shouldn’t be. The whole point is to keep things human-scale. But a few small improvements could make it easier to stick around, read more, and maybe even contribute something back without feeling like you need to build a whole platform just to say your piece.
That’s really all I want out of it. A place that’s simple, a little more connected, and worth coming back to at the end of the day.
This is a pretty long one. A lot to digest.
There's a question that's been nagging at me lately, and maybe you've wondered about it too if you spend time in the quieter corners of the internet. We've got this growing movement of people who are tired of corporate social media, who are rediscovering old bulletin board systems, setting up Gemini capsules, hanging out on IRC, and basically saying “no thanks” to the modern web's endless scroll of algorithmic feeds and surveillance. And then we've got AI exploding onto the scene, which seems like exactly the kind of thing these folks are running away from.
So can these worlds coexist? Or is trying to bring AI into small web spaces like inviting a bulldozer to a community garden?
I think they can work together, but it requires being really thoughtful about how and why. Let me explain.
There is a WWIV 5.8 bulletin board system running on a Debian VPS somewhere on the internet. It has a handful of message subs (small web, fediverse, self-hosting, Linux), a modest file section, and online door games piped in through BBSLink and DoorParty. You can reach it by firing up a telnet client, something most people haven't done since the Clinton administration.
That BBS is mine. It's called RetroBoard BBS, and for the better part of a year, almost nobody has used it.
That's not a complaint. It's context.