Author: <span>calvusrex</span>
Saturday 5 September 2026
6.48pm
Every generation has catch phrases and words associated with them. Currently, the word is “slop.”
I’m just going to be very blunt with my thoughts on this. If you use the word slop in your post, article, blog, whatever, as soon as I see it I will have lost all interest in what you have to say.
Why? Because you are a hypocrite.
You are ranting and raving about something on the premise that it was created without “human thinking.” When you use that word, you are doing exactly what you are ranting about – not thinking by gratuitously using the current rallying cry against AI instead of having a thought of your own.
I scan though posts on bubble.town, Reddit, mastodon.social, indieweb.social, and Lemmy and this word get’s tossed around so much that people using it think they are coming across as being on “team human” when in fact it feels like they can’t think, on their own, of a better word or original thought than slop.
I would rather read “AI slop” that at least has the excuse in that it is only regurgitating human input, but what is the excuse for those humans producing their own “slop?” Every post ranting against AI slop is the same, repetitive, boring as fuck party line. You are not saying anything new. You are not making a case against AI. You are just doing what AI does: repeating what you ingest.
So yeah, ride your high horse and think you have something useful to say.
You don’t.
Saturday 29 August 2026
4.44pm
My brain still thinks I am 30 and my body fights it tooth and nail. I had a band gig last night, old school 9pm to 1am. The gig was over an hour away so I loaded my vehicle at 5pm with all the PA and my gear then drove out there. two hours to unload/setup, four hours of playing, and other hour of tear down and then another hour and 15 minute drive back home put me home at 3:15am. 10 hours for a few days of gas money.
It’s a good thing I love playing music.
But I woke up today around 9am, sore, tired, and lethargic. I didn’t unload last night so I still have to do that, and I am putting it off. My body hurts. People don’t realize how physical it is to be in a local band. We don’t have roadies, and instrument techs. We do more than just “stand up there an play” (which is also exhausting…if you have ever performed at a biker bar you know how energetic it gets and it is easy to get lost in the “moment”).
Yet I keep on doing it, at 60 years old. Ask me today If I want a gig this week and you would think I would turn it down, knowing how exhausted I get… but I would take it.
To be honest, I don’t know how long I can hold this pace up. I “really’ love playing for an audience. It’s like a drug. But my old, out of shape, dad bod that has ailments a lot of guys my age have, it’s starting to complain, loudly and clearly.
Part of me thinks I should find and pay a young person to help with the hard physical labor portions of gigging, take the pay cut and be happy with it because I am still doing what I love. I have truly considered this. But the money, while not enough to pay my bills is pretty solid income to fill in the gaps. Taking a pay cut would be noticeable I think.
I am honestly just thinking out loud here, on a day that I have been napping and nursing my old ass all day. But getting old is become a very real reality.
Sunday 23 August 2026
5.33pm
Spend enough time poking around Mastodon instances, looking at who runs the bigger ActivityPub servers, or reading about governments experimenting with decentralized social media, and a pattern starts to show up. A surprising amount of the interesting activity has happened outside the United States.
Japan, Germany, India, and even China come up again and again in the history of the fediverse. American institutions, meanwhile, have mostly watched from the sidelines while Silicon Valley platforms grew larger and more centralized.
I went looking for academic research to see whether that impression holds up. The answer is: maybe, but the research I found does not really answer the question I was asking.
Two studies from Arizona State University looked closely at migration away from Twitter. One focused on the Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus after Musk’s takeover. A later study looked at migration to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads at the same time. Both examined who left Twitter, why they left, what made them stay on another platform, and how the different platforms shaped user behavior.
Neither study breaks the data down by country.
The researchers were interested in behavior, not geography. So if you’re hoping for a clean chart showing “Mastodon users by nation,” you’re going to be disappointed. I was.
That missing data is worth mentioning because a lot of what gets said about international fediverse adoption, including what I’m about to say, comes from scattered reporting and institutional history rather than good comparative survey data.
Still, the scattered evidence is interesting.
Mastodon was reportedly much bigger in Japan than in most other countries for years before many Americans had heard of it. A big part of that came from Pixiv, which launched a Mastodon-based server called Pawoo not long after Mastodon itself appeared in 2016. Pawoo quickly became one of the largest individual servers on the network.
Germany’s role looks different. Its influence is less about one giant server and more about the institutional side of the project. Mastodon is developed by a German nonprofit. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein runs its own instance through the project. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund has also provided more than half a million euros for infrastructure work.
The European Union went a step further with EU Voice, an official Mastodon instance intended to give EU institutions an alternative to American-owned social networks. The experiment lasted a couple of years before being wound down.
India has its own chapter in the story. In 2019, nearly 20,000 Indian Twitter users temporarily moved to Mastodon during a dispute over moderation. Homegrown Mastodon-derived services such as Tooter also appeared, although Tooter became controversial over changes it had made to the underlying code.
China is a very different case. Mastodon has been used there as a way around domestic censorship. That’s not really the same phenomenon as Americans leaving Twitter because they dislike a new owner or recommendation algorithm. For some Chinese users, decentralized social media has been about access to open communication in the first place.
Australia had another kind of example. Switter was a Mastodon instance built specifically for sex workers. It eventually shut down in 2022 after legal and regulatory changes in Australia and the United States made operating it increasingly difficult.
None of this proves that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in fediverse adoption. I don’t think the available evidence supports a claim that strong.
What it does suggest is that institutions and communities outside the US have sometimes treated decentralized social media as something worth building deliberately.
In Japan, the motivation was partly cultural and community-driven. In Germany and the EU, digital sovereignty played a role. In China, censorship circumvention mattered. In India and Australia, particular communities had reasons to create alternatives that served needs mainstream platforms were not meeting.
The American experience has looked different. Mastodon tends to get attention here when something goes wrong somewhere else. Twitter changes ownership. A moderation policy changes. Another platform does something users hate. People rush toward Mastodon, create accounts, look around, and some of them stay.
That is not the same thing as deciding ahead of time that decentralized communication infrastructure is worth having.
That distinction between reactive migration and deliberate infrastructure-building may be the more interesting question. I just haven’t found the dataset that would let me prove it.
The broader small web is even harder to pin down. I’m thinking here of Gemini, old Gopher servers, personal HTML sites, webrings, and the various little corners of the internet that never quite accepted that five giant websites should become the internet.
I have no solid numbers on where those people live.
My own experience gives me the impression that Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries are overrepresented in those spaces too. That would make some sense given how often those countries appear in open-source and digital-rights communities more generally.
But that’s a hunch. I can’t point to a study that demonstrates it, and I’d rather call it a hunch than dress it up as data.
If anyone knows of research that actually maps fediverse or small-web adoption by country, with real numbers behind it, I’d like to read it.
Until then, this is an observation built from scattered evidence rather than a documented trend. And when it comes to the small web, that may be about as much certainty as the available data allows.
Wednesday 19 August 2026
9.39pm
I really thought that I had found a viable home. A place where I could write to my hearts content and maybe actually have it viewed by someone.
The #smallweb is a wonderful thing. But is, at times, it’s like space: cold and lonely. I thought federating my blogs would find life in the universe that is the web.
I was wrong.
All I have found is snobs. #Gatekeepers who, if it doesn’t meet their narrow-minded standards, belittle, admonish, and even suspend accounts for things they don’t see “fit.” I cry bullshit!
I have another blog that I maintain that has articles about tech, computers, the independent web, old and alternative technology, and the ways technology shapes how we communicate, create, work, and live. I have written a few so far and have some already written that I am spacing out so I don’t flood with posts. I use AI generated images for my posts. Why? Because I have a full-time job, I’m in graduate school earning my MA in American History, I play in multiple bands throughout the week… spending time searching for a public-domain, free-use, RELEVANT image for my posts is something I don’t spend time on. AI generates a useful image to get the point across – that’s all that is needed.
But no… one of those snobby, federated gatekeepers decided my posts were ALL AI and they suspended my account. No message. No “we’ve had multiple reports of blah, blah, blah,” just me happening to view my content details and seeing it suspended. A few emails, and Mastodon got me back… but not without damage done.
I now have to prove every single point of my online existence along with just trying to say what I want to say. Fuck that.
The small-web (#gemini capsules, phlogs, etc) are wonderful things. They just fall into the cracks most of the time. But, I can write about what I want to write and how I want to write.
Maybe that is more important than a federated gatekeeper, who doesn’t know me from Adam, judging me.
Sunday 16 August 2026
9.52pm
I started GemCities at the beginning of March 2026. A mere five months ago. I had started really getting into the whole Gemini protocol/small-web thing and decided that it would be cool if there was a simple way to test the waters without actually having to stand up a server to publish, while still being in total control of your capsule.
The idea came to me from the past, the exact vibe that the small-web encompasses, in the form of the classic GeoCities. Simple, easy to use, no hassles with servers and domains, just sign up and begin creating.
I decided GemCities would be a free, donation-supported hosting service for the Gemini protocol, a small, quiet corner of the internet that strips away the noise of the modern web. No ads, no analytics, no tracking, no paywalls, and no plans to add any. Every capsule gets 50 MB of storage, which is generous for gemtext files. Simple publishing infrastructure, run ethically, kept simple on purpose. A HUGE feature is that the users own the content they publish. GemCities claims no rights over it. They can export all their capsule files at any time from the editor with one click. Content is not held hostage.
The process is idiot-proof – Pick a username. A capsule will be generated at username.gemcities.com on the Gemini network. Then use the web editor to write gemtext files. A live preview shows exactly how the capsule will look. Save the file. It’s live instantly. No deploys, no configuration, no waiting. I mean, how much simpler could it be?
To be honest, after I worked out the code, the backend, and the security and privacy/DMCA/abuse concerns, and launched, I figured I would get a handful of users over the next 6 months or so with a lot of spam accounts (which I did get a TON of and eventually worked out a process to weed most of them out automatically).
It is now five months later and GemCities is sitting at 126 users.
Now, I will be the first to admit that about 10% of those accounts aren’t really active. I think they were created and then the person decided not to follow through. Still, the remaining 90% are actually active accounts with content. The beauty is that, honestly, it has been hands-off. It is working and I have gotten feedback about the service.
I have had people ask for features and other things, but because of how it was designed and managed (by me, a one-man team), feature sprawl has to be kept in check. Also, privacy issues are a real concern to me. For example, I had someone ask for a public directory of users. I replied that,
I understand why people want a public GemCities directory. Discovery matters, and a browsable list would be convenient. But I’m not going to publish one. GemCities is a hosting service, not a social platform or community index. Users get a public Gemini capsule at their own subdomain, but they did not consent to being listed in an operator-maintained directory. Publishing one would change the privacy expectations of the service after the fact. That fits how GemCities is built: no analytics, popularity features, social mechanics, centralized search, or promotion layer. The goal is to make publishing on Gemini easy while leaving discovery to users and the wider Gemini ecosystem. People who want to be found can share their capsule, link it elsewhere, use existing Gemini discovery tools, or participate in community spaces. What I won’t do is list everyone by default. This isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a trust decision.
All I can say is I would not have guessed this would be as successful (to me anyway) as it has become. I see GemCities users posting on some of the main Gemini communities (like Station, GeminiSpace BBS, Antenna, Cosmos, etc.) and it makes me feel really good that these people are using my service and joining the small web-community.
And, finally, while I am not patting my own back, I am proud that I can provide this service at no cost. The money it costs to run this is microscopic in terms of what I am offering and what it means to me. A lot of people these days tend to create an app or service and their sole motivation is to earn money from it. Not me. On my own capsule (gemini://calvusrex.gemcities.com), I make it very clear where I stand:
I don’t really need support. I host GemCities because I want to, because I think there is a need for it, and because I like to make it easy for folks to be involved in something that I have grown to have a passion for.
However, if you do feel so inclined, here is the link to my Ko-Fi page. I thank you ahead of time mostly for reading my capsule, and if you are a user of GemCities, I thank you for using the service and I hope it is something you find enjoyable!
Sunday 16 August 2026
3.21pm
I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while… a couple of years probably. But I ran across a post on mastodon.social that made me stop and pause and think, “OK, what is really the status of things right now, in mid-2026?” The post read:
As attempts to lock down “the #internet” grow, alongside it will grow the rebirth of an age of #zines, #BBS, #mixtapes, #burnedCDs, and other hand-to-hand media. People will bypass restrictions, even if it’s by paper and #sneakernet or #CB radios in the wild. (original link)
So, the web. Yeah, it is a hot fucking mess. I remember when it began dethroning BBS systems in the very early 1990s. It was cool; it offered a LOT of things that DOS-based systems were never designed to do.
It enhanced technology. Yeah, that right there is where things started going horribly wrong wrapped in something magnificently wonderful.
The ability to do things easily, efficiently, and, for lack of a better term, “plug and play” was the byproduct. The easier computers and the web became to use, the less ordinary users needed to understand what was underneath them. That was mostly a good thing, but it also made it easier for ownership to shift away from the user. Eventually we stopped running things and started opening accounts on things other people ran for us.
I read another post that kind of feeds off that thought. It said,
It’s easy to feel secure when a platform is in its golden era. But we’ve watched the downfalls of Twitter, the policy shifts of Reddit, and the changing tides of algorithmic networks. Relying blindly on a centralized portal not owned by you means your life’s work can alter overnight based entirely on a corporate boardroom decision.
The modern web is no longer a place of wonder and discovery. It’s the other side of the tracks. The part of town you probably shouldn’t be in. The “nothing good happens after midnight” underbelly that separates people into four camps: those who don’t care, those who are too complacent to change, those who check out completely, and those who care and try to be mindful and find safe alternatives or practices.
The first camp is those who basically shrug their shoulders and say, “It is what it is.” They literally don’t care and let the chips fall where they may.
The second camp knows things are not right, and might even make a half-hearted attempt to change their habits, but ends up back where they were before because changing is hard, complicated at times, and takes them out of their comfort zone.
The third group has largely checked out. They minimize their online presence as much as modern life permits, although banking, government services, communication, and commerce make completely opting out increasingly difficult.
Then there is the last group. This group is actually more like two factions: one, the small web, and two, federation. They share some of the same basic ethos, but, honestly, they are two very distinct animals.
So, the small web in a nutshell is the human-scaled, independently controlled part of the internet: personal sites, blogs, digital gardens, small communities, independent publications, and creative projects built primarily to publish, communicate, and share rather than maximize growth or engagement. It favors individual ownership, privacy, open standards, hyperlinks, RSS, human curation, and deliberate discovery over corporate platforms, tracking, advertising, and algorithmic feeds. It is not defined by a particular technology, aesthetic, or total rejection of commerce. A site can be modern, multimedia, or commercial and still belong to the small web if it remains independently operated, human-scaled, and oriented toward people rather than metrics, surveillance, and platform control.
That sounds great. It fits into the post I started with: people digging back into what the original internet was and still could be. The BBS, Gopher, IRC, RSS, terminal, etc. The Gemini protocol has made it simple yet more accessible. The small web ethos values independence, human expression, privacy, open standards, and meaningful connection over platforms, surveillance, algorithms, and growth at all costs.
The other alternative is sites that are “federated.” A federated site or instance is an independently operated server that can communicate and interact with other compatible servers through a shared protocol, while retaining its own users, rules, moderation, and administration.
Fairly close to the small web. But not really.
The small web and the federated web share a strong distrust of centralized platforms, but they approach independence differently. The small web emphasizes personal ownership, individuality, human-scale publishing, direct links, and intentional discovery. Federated sites emphasize interoperability: independent servers and communities can communicate with one another through shared protocols such as ActivityPub while remaining separately operated.
Their ethos overlaps around decentralization, user control, privacy, open standards, and resistance to corporate gatekeeping. The key distinction is that the small web does not need to form a network at all; a personal website can simply exist on its own, while federation deliberately connects independent sites into a larger social system. In that sense, the small web favors independence; the federated web tries to preserve that independence while still providing networked community.
So, now understanding basically the three states of the online world, and the four facets of human participation, what is the point?
Good question. I personally find myself torn between all three positions.
Yeah, the modern internet is an enshittified wasteland that is quickly becoming hostile to any sort of real human interaction. Everything is analytics-driven. Likes, karma, upvotes, shares, views, blah blah blah. There is real content on the web, but it is completely buried under the pile of shit we have allowed it to become. The small web is refreshing, but only for that fourth camp I mentioned. Anyone else, at best, will try it and then think, “This is too hard,” “This doesn’t make sense,” and basically give up and go back to their “safe and easy” web.
Federation, on the other hand, presents an interesting position. It basically says, “The small web asks you to build your own place on the internet. Federation gives you a neighborhood to move into. It also offers the convenience and social connection of modern platforms without requiring one corporation to own the platform, the audience, and the rules.”
But here is the conundrum: Federation is in the better position to attract large numbers of people away from the modern corporate web. The small web is better positioned to influence the culture of whatever comes next. So, which is the path to follow? That is the tough question (maybe not for some).
I’ll leave this with my feeling on that as of Sunday, August 16, 2026: The small web is and should be influential in the next phases of the culture of the future of the web. Right now, it’s fringe still. It is nowhere like the BBS scene was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that was still fairly niche. My question is: can they get past the (yes, this is harsh) snobbery they present? Some in that camp are so inflexible it’s crazy.
Federation decentralizes ownership, but it doesn’t necessarily change human behavior. You can distribute the servers and still recreate cliques, popularity contests, gatekeeping, pile-ons, moderation wars, and many of the social habits that made corporate social media miserable in the first place.
So, is the problem actually centralization, or is part of the problem social media itself?
That’s a much deeper issue.
The small web changes the behavioral model. Federation largely changes the ownership/network model. Mastodon still asks you to follow people, post into timelines, reply, boost, favorite, and watch notifications. A personal website/phlog/gemcapsule asks you to publish something and let someone deliberately come read it.
So, yeah, I am straddling all three right now. Hedging my bets to see which camp leads the way while keeping one iron in the existing modern web mess. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question when we ask which one will win. Federation may be the thing capable of getting people out of corporate platforms, while the small web may be the thing that reminds us why getting out mattered in the first place.
Sunday 16 August 2026
7.38am
Offgrid Holdout has gone through quite a few iterations trying to find a place for it. It originally was a SSH BBS, then a small web site, then a pubnix.
Now, I’ve taken it back to something simple and manageable. It’s running a very bare bones WordPress with a totally custom designed theme. All the unnecessary fluff in WP has been taken out and things tightened down. The theme wraps everything nicely and plugins are (right now) less than 5 (one is a custom designed plugin to display my self-hosted Navidrome music).
I also have moved closer to federated connections as opposed to the small web. I still maintain a small web presence and believe in it, but federation fits me better int he nice gray area between the modern web and the small web.
Another reason for the change is I wanted to decommission the VPS that Offgrid Holdout was running on. Moving to one of my VPS that hosts other websites allowed me to do that and save some money in the process.
While I was doing that I decided that I had a computer running services on a local server that I could easily migrate to another local server, so I spent the day yesterday moving those services, tightening up the server they moved to, and updating my infrastructure documentation. In three years of just having my daily desktop I have a lot more services on 3 local servers running that back then. Sprawl and keeping things tracked and documented takes more time than you would expect.
I’m really going to try and stay on track with this blog. I think I will.
