Circumlunar space

Today I am following in the recent footsteps of Tomasino[1] and the more distant

footsteps of Jandal[2] and Jynx[3] in moving my blog off of SDF. More

precisely, I will be "bihosting" like Jynx, in some sense. All new phlog content

will be posted on my new server, circumlunar.space. All old phlog content will

exist on circumlunar.space and SDF simultaneously, so that old links do not

break. I will maintain an up-to-date root gophermap at both locations, but the

entries on the SDF gophermap will point to the corresponding content on

circumlunar. This way my content can still be reached from the gopher.club

listing.

The new URL for my phlog (i.e. the one you should put into your moku-pona or

bongusta configuration) is:

gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/phlog

The fact that I have used the tilde-username URL convention should be a clue to

what is about to follow. circumlunar.space is not just a server to host my own

phlog, but rather I want to offer free gopherspace to anybody else who wants it,

too. It would make me incredibly happy if circumlunar.space were to become a

small node in the phlogosphere, similar to say, grex.org.

If you are currently active in the phlogosphere, such that I feel like I "know

you", and you would like your phlog hosted at circumlunar.space, generate an ssh

keypair and email me the public key. I will give you shell access (don't get

excited, you'll get a 200MB quota on my tiny disk and the firewall prevents any

outgoing traffic except DNS, NTP, HTTP and Gopher).

If I don't know you from a bar of soap and you would like your phlog hosted at

circumlunar.space, do exactly the same thing. I will give you sftp-only access

to a non-CGI gopherhole and you can maintain it that way. If you are active in

the community for a few months and appear trustworthy, I'll give you shell

access at that time.

If enough people end up with shell accounts on this box, I will try to put some

cool stuff on there, like an intenal-only mailserver or IRC server or whatever,

and try to make a nice little community there. But let's see how many people

turn up first, and what the cheapest VPS I could find can support, and whether

or not I maintain interest in this.

I won't pretend that the main driver behind me doing this is not frustration at

yet more bullshit, ham-fisted, top-down meddling in SDF's gopherspace, but I

don't really want to talk about or focus on that now. Instead I want to focus

on the much happier motivation, the one behidn the fact that I had been mulling

this plan over for a while, and was therefore ready to act in an instant when

provoked. Cat[4] said, in response to Tomasino's moving, that he liked the

idea of "a wider gopher web", and that is what I really hope to achieve with

this new project. I feel like gopherspace is heating up right now, getting

larger and more active, and I'm really excited about that. I think it is very

important for the long-term health of the protocol that we move away from the

current model of 99% of phlogs being hosted on SDF. Not because SDF is bad

(it's not, and just like Cat I find people moving their phlogs off it

bittersweet), but because monocultures are bad and single points of failure are

bad.

Here is to every more stars in the gopher skies!

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180310-black

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/jynx/dat/20180107.post

[3] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~jandal/phlog/announcement-new-gopher-server

[4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/cat/phlog/fs20180312.txt