## 2026-09-04 / Friday

### New places, old faces

I just read that one of the more active citizens of the Shore
(stating the facts, after a thorough research of available
content, not judging anyone for not trying harder, or whatnot), is
actally a former member of RTC.  [I actually found a piece of a
discussion on shlog, regarding the "slow chess" concept from years
ago, now I know why the name rang a bell]

I meet, or see people who once were, or are still lurking on
rawtext.club - everywhere on the "small" internet. It's good to
see the resilience of the culture. Sites come and go, but people
keep doing their thing, create content worth reading, cludging
small (and not so small) tools to make their experience better.

### Editors
(in response to ~oberon's question)

Some time ago (years, actually, I just picked it up again
recently) I wrote 'xi' (as in "a remote cousin of vi", not to
honour the Great Pooh-Bear of China) - a... let's say a
screen-oriented line editor in Slope (a Scheme dialect, kind of
endemic to RTC). It was a fun project, ~sloum (the creator of
Slope) helped significantly with improvements, and -- I hope -- it
was a good non-entirely-trivial test case for the interpreter.
It covers one recurring use-case: I scroll through content of a
file (what I would do with 'less' these days), but then suddenly I
see a line I want to change. Enter, edit, enter - done. Save it
and it's fixed. 

In my neverending quest to get as much functionality as it gets
out of Bash shell I wrote a few editors in it as well:
- bashed ("Bash ed") that implements a reasonable subset of "ed"
- a noname set of 7 or 10 functions that can be pasted into
  MobaXterm to implement an "in-memory" ed in a remote Bash (good
  for editing configuration files in restricted shell
  environments.
- a 'nano' parody (onano) that is usable enough to dupe some of my
  colleagues at work into believing they're using the "real shit"
- fred - a "FRiendly ED" wrapper for 'ed'
- freddy - a wrapper for 'ed' that emulates a "greenbar" printing
  terminal
- freddy.tty - basically the above, plus an animated printer's
  caret.

I'm also maintaining my own forks of wily (this one to the extent
of hijacking the project, it's not "your father's editor" anymore
- I cleaned up small issues, added some readline inspired
shortcuts, made it compilable on a modern-ish Linux, made the TCL,
Python, Perl and shell interaction usable again) and plan9port's
acme (added acme2k extensions, also implemented compile-time
colour schemes).

Wily is my main tool for interactions with smolnet sites and some
RTC services -- its Acme-inspired architecture makes it a good
front-end for command-line utiities, and it allows me to focus on
the "business logic" of the protocols without spending too much
time on UI development. I'm okayish with Tk, Web frontends,
Curses, but there's not much interesting to do, in my opinion,
while processing the I/O of Nex, Gemini etc. gives plenty of
challenges.

### A set of (padded) echo chambers or a community?

My first "internet" experience was a BBS. Not really "internet",
but a dial-in kind of it. It required a special software to get
all updates, incoming messages etc. in a batch, so the costs of
actually calling a modem somewhere else won't cost an exorbitant
amount of money. I could read it, answer the messages, post my own
stuff, and everything got uploaded next time I connected to the
service. So, in a way, it was much slower than any "slow" internet
site of today. 
Random aside: at some point they switched to MajorBBS and I began
using hypertext and markup, before HTML became a thing. 
For years I put "Hypertext and markup since 1992" in my job
resumes, so I could do the "Do not cite the Deep Magic to me,
Witch. I was there when it was written", when someone said
anything about HTML being invented in 1995. 
Back from the tangent -- the BBS was not only a "place where I get
my warez from" -- it was a small community, with all things a real
community brings -- help, support, unbelievable levels of
condescension, jokes, good and not so good stories.
Then, for a while, there was nothing, just stuff like geocities
and other freebie sites offering a little space for one's own
webpage. I guess, before explosion of the social media, the most
"social" thing on the net were news, mailing lists, and webrings.
Then, everybody had facebook or twitter or tumblr, or whatnot.
There was SDF, but it was more about having an access to a
reasonably good Unix shell. Some space for a webpage, some space
for gopher (I remembered Gopher from my university time -- anyone
here rememers Webferret? :D) But a community? Not if you didn't
actively looked for contacts.
Then I joined rawtext.club, and some tilde\..* sites.
tilde.town tried to give an analogue of a town, with facilities
everybody could use, but somehow it didn't work for me.
RTC was different, and I guess it wasn't just the quality of
people it attracted, but the toolbox they offered. Yes - everybody
had their own public area (gemini, html, gopher), but there were
also local blogs, bulletins, a slow, text-based chat resembling a
little the twtxt concept. The admin, ~cmccabe, provided (with
support of others) a small tool, called 'recent', that showed the
recent changes - who posted, when, what. Non-intrusively, it just
scanned the local resources that were public anyway. The
discoverability made the site work as a small, busy community.
Someone developed something, wrote an essay, saved a nifty
oneliner or an interesting link, and anyone who ran 'recent' would
know there's something going on. And people reacted, helped, gave
their proverbial 2 cents. I had most interesting conversations
with people who are experts in things I only skimmed. Wrote stuff
together with people whose experience with programming is probably
two orders of magnitude above mine. Sometimes I knew something
they didn't, I hope -- otherwise it would be an awfully unbalanced
information flow. 
And now, every time I see a new site, new protocol emerging -- I
wonder -- is it possible to use it to bring people closer
together? There are so many little projects, from art, through
philosophy, games, to software and hardware "hacking", and a lot
of them are done by folks who did it for fun, without looking for
fame and acknowledgment, but worth looking at, reading,
contributing to and, erm, stealing one or another idea from.
It doesn't take a lot, it doesn't have to be a carbon copy of like
and share shtick of "social" media. Just make it discoverable. 
Otherwise it will become yet another cluster of small sites
written by one and read by none.