Starting afresh

It’s nice to set up your digital workspace again sometimes, from scratch. One that isn’t your main computer so as to not interfere with ongoing work. You are freed from the shackles of backward compatibility and limitations of your previous setups. Pick a new shell, use another file manager, another editor.

Pubnixes^[1] provide you a shell account and web, sometimes gemini and gopher hosting. When you log in with SSH, you are presented with a new home. A shell that may be different to your primary workstation, none of your familiar aliases and shell scripts, only some CLI programs you know and love are installed and there are some tools you’ve never heard of.

You feel a responsibility to tend to your new digital garden that is your public home page. You explore the local services, such as decentralized chat, a local forum, a wiki, and you start to discover foreign workflows you consider adopting.

Getting a package installed typically involves contacting a sysadmin. But since you are not the only user on the system, it’s likely others have similar problems and have solved it using a different tool. You get to learn new ways to do things, such as editing files and browsing the internet from the command line and the local file system. It’s like moving in to a friend’s place temporarily, or settling in a dorm room of a different country — you shop in unfamiliar places and buy things from unfamiliar brands.

It might seem daunting, especially when it’s put this way, and even more so when you look at it from the perspective of needing to set up everything again, the way you’re used to. However, similar to moving to a different country permanently, you would sometimes discover things you otherwise would not have if not for having to go out looking for alternatives.

rawtext.club (“RTC”) is a pubnix I was a member of for several years. It was recently reinstated on a different server, and I had to experience exactly what I described. Note this though: I wasn’t setting up a new laptop, it was a digital home like any other, but with different purposes. ranger, a terminal file manager I use everywhere else was not installed, and so I decided to try out another TUI file manager I’ve been looking at, broot. The fish shell isn’t installed like it used to either, so I decided to roll with bash and get familiar with ctrl-r. There were no static-site generators; I decided to try something new, such as kiln or burrow, or simply do with a hacky shell script for now until my site or gopherhole grows out of it, if ever.

On my computer, I would normally refrain from trying a different tool when I’m perfectly happy with what I have. Tools that I don’t have issues with that solve the same problem are most likely equally good when we valuate it based on how well it solves all of my problems, and usually making the migration (muscle memory and learning curve included) to make one thing a little easier isn’t worth it in the long run. On RTC, I was more than happy to try different tools because there was practically zero risk (most of my work does not occur there), and that there was no status quo to challenge in the first place.

Through this process I might discover something interesting or another way of doing things that can benefit other aspects of my digital workspace because as times goes on I would not do it the same way had I started from scratch. It’s like making different choices when you play a choose-your-adventure game a second time, or living an alternate version of myself. I see my existing decisions in new light, explore possible solutions for tools I have issues with, and most importantly, I’ve made myself comfortable in a second home quite unalike the one I’m used to.

It’s nice to start afresh sometimes.