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!