------------------------------------------------------------------- +title: The Smolnet - What I really like about it +date: Thu, 17 Apr 2025 03:25:59 +0200 +author: -fab- ------------------------------------------------------------------- ___________.__ \__ ___/| |__ ____ | | | | \_/ __ \ | | | Y \ ___/ |____| |___| /\___ > \/ \/ _________ .__ __ / _____/ _____ ____ | | ____ _____/ |_ \_____ \ / \ / _ \| | / \_/ __ \ __\ / \ Y Y ( <_> ) |_| | \ ___/| | /_______ /__|_| /\____/|____/___| /\___ >__| \/ \/ \/ \/ <== What I really like about the Smolnet ==> Time for another meta post about the Smolnet and what I really like about it. It's not only the privacy and the advertisement-free, distraction-free experience. And it's not simply to have a Gemini Capsule, a Gopher Hole, or a finger server, and to be independent from the big web oligarchs that divide the web into their own silos, which spy on us all the time for some nefarious reason and squeeze out every little bit of information from their users for marketing, advertising purposes, or other malicious things. <== The Do-It-Yourself Attitude ==> These things are really good to have and a good reason to partake in the Smolnet, but what I really like is the Do-It-Yourself attitude of its users. They build their own tools and tool-chains, servers, browsers, scripts and utilities - and share them! There are Gemini/Gopher directories, post aggregators, search engines, news scrapers, tinylogs, query engines for multiple sites like Wikipedia and other news sites and a lot more. We have forum sites like BBS and station and I don't know how many browsers and servers for Gemini and Gopher. All these things are developed for the community by the community, including the tools for the Gemini Capsules/Gopher Holes themselves. This encompasses also the little programs to build article indexes and post feeds for aggregators, or to collect content in your browser. Innovations like bacardi55's tinylogs and Gemini-Mentions are also part of this effort. All these great things are made for fun and to enjoy our creativity. I for example still use nytpu's gemlog.sh bash script[1] to build my Gemlog index and feed and have it heavily customized to my needs and used it as a template for my phlog script which does the same for my Gopher phlog and creates a gophermap and a feed file. But there are others like gempost[2], which some people prefer, and also other tools[3]. I also developed two bash scripts which prepare my posts to the end resulting Gemini or Gopher file (with all the marks) and then run the build scripts and upload the diff to my Gopher / Gemini / Finger / WWW server. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~nytpu/gemlog.sh [2]: https://github.com/justlark/gempost [3]: https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini <== The Joy of Simplicity ==> Exactly because Gopher and Gemini (and Finger) are such simple protocols, it's relatively easy for newcomers too to set up a Gopher Hole or a Gemini Capsule and to cobble together a toolchain. There's nothing more exciting than getting your own script running. Okay - it's easier if you already have some IT experience, but even if you get stuck, there are always people in the community who are ready to help. <== So I built my own Smolnet universe! ==> All these reasons brought me to build my own server, which runs on FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE for now. It supports Gemini, Gopher, Finger and the WWW, whereas my web presence is only a proxy to my Gemini content. And recently I added a Gopher-To-Web proxy[4], which provides my Gopher content on the web[5], and which I'm developing myself in Go. [4]: https://codeberg.org/fab/go-gopherproxy [5]: https://redterminal.org/gopher/ Doing all this and building up my own server with all it tooling feels very rewarding and gives me a feeling of success, if I add a new feature, build a new script or something else. And all of this is "Do-It-Yourself"! So build up a Gopher/Gemini server yourself! It brings lot of pleasure! All in all - Have fun! -fab-