Seeing the recent spike in users and reading some interesting posts, I felt really curious as to the ways people came across this bit of the internet. So to put it clearly :
How did you find yourself on midnight.pub?
First I found out about the Gemini protocol while reading about alternative web protocols, then I downloaded a client (Lagrange, in particular) to browse some capsules.
I needed either a list of known sites or a search engine since I was a newcomer to the whole thing. Found one which was also a statistics site of which capsules have the most entries in the engine.
Midnight pub was at the top
I think I have quite the interesting answer to this particular survey. Only if you wouldn't mind reading an essay of course.
A while ago, I started learning about Common Lisp (CL), because it seemed quite interesting with its unusual syntax and almost fanatical advocates. I learned a lot about it, loved it, started using it for fun things. Eventually I got to the point where I wanted to do a bit of GUI programming with CL, so started learning what seemed like the most interesting (and reasonably popular) library for that: McCLIM.
While I was doing that however, I got stuck quite often. The examples given in the documentation seemed hard to interpret (and sometimes even contradictory, though that may have been my lack of understanding) so I wanted to see some example code other people wrote. While I was looking for apps written using clim, I came across observatory (https://github.com/jstoddard/observatory) which seemed like an interesting app.
Observatory seemed interesting not because it seemed like exactly the thing I wanted (it was) but also because it's a gemini client. I had never heard of gemini. After that, a bit of googling led me down *that* rabbit hole, which (after even more browsing) led me to nightfall city. One of the pages listed in nightfall city was the pub, and after some browsing it quickly caught my attention in how laidback it all was.
The entire thing seemed so interesting to me. Small, interconnected communities almost never even heard of, surviving on simplistic web pages and custom-made protocols...
Kind of sounded like a dream at first, to be honest. It was refreshing compared to the never-ending noise pollution that is modern social media.
So anyway, that was my journey here. I'm not usually one to believe in fate, but maybe there's some of that here.
Howdy,
don't really remember, how I got here. But it must have been mentioned on the old gemini-devel mailing list (which rests in peace since quite a while). I did lurk for months, but eventually I asked for the magic spell. :-)
Found it in a thread on a somewhat obscure forum, the thread was about interesting websites to check out and thought it looked really cool.
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I came to the nightfall.city and first thing i do when i come to a new place is: i go to a bar.
But to elaborate more one the theme...
There was time when i broke free from the corporate grip. i made kind of detox. And then returning back to tech, wanting to change the previous patterns i started research diverse forums, mastodon instances and other tools and gadgets for communication...
And then at one point in all this diversity of tools and stuff i noticed two tools i was using i liked a lot more then others, then i notice both were coded by the same person... (One was ichi.city web hosting and some other of the m15o ecosystem tools.) then i started digging in the playground of m15o, he opened the doors for me into the nex universe... And nightfall.city runs on nex! And midnight.pub is in nightfall... So here we are! cheers to all the newcomers.
I would call this pub the model for a sane social network. for my taste the best alternative to main-stream social media... The other problem is to implement it in the social circle aka persuade friends to use it.
I do not want to sound rude... but as system admin (lets say i am learning this craft) i just care about virtual profiles, data and code that makes the service run smooth and secure.
Sijmen J. Mulder's list of simple text sites.
I saw it on some list of interesting and odd forums online.