Reviving Traditional Formats: The Benefits of Using Legacy Protocols in Digital Publishing

 

Benefits of publishing using legacy protocols and formats

causa-arcana.com

6 min

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Let us look at things from the point of view of those whose ideal really is material prosperity, and who therefore actually admire all the changes brought into life by modern progress. But aren't they also deceived? Do the use of instant communications and other such things, as well as the more hectic and complicated modern life, really make today's people happier than their ancestors? On the contrary, the opposite is true: the lack of balance and balance cannot be a condition for true happiness.

René Guenon, “The Crisis of the Modern World” (1927), chapter 7

The development of digital means of communication often goes in the direction of reducing the costs of transmitting information. For many, instant messaging and social networks have replaced email and website browsing. For most areas of human activity, this trend has both negative and positive sides. Their relationship can be debated, and I will consider this topic separately.

At the same time, I am sure that reducing the costs of information exchange has led to a real disaster for journalism, that is, in those areas where there are no objective criteria of truth. This includes philosophy, religion, ethics, politics. Without criteria, the success of an idea depends on how the audience perceives it. At the same time, an increase in the size of the audience or the frequency of publication of materials is often taken as success. However, these areas of human knowledge do not tolerate quantitative assessments. Truth does not depend on how many people share it. For the triumph of justice, what is more important is the quality of people and their readiness to act in accordance with the declared principles. What's worse is that technology gives a voice to those who would otherwise have no authority, preferring empty talk to action. The criticism of this crowd can undermine the resolve of even the strongest.

It’s even worse if, instead of inaction, you decide to resist this pressure using the methods that are imposed on you. Taking publication topics out of thin air for the sake of quantity, publishing other people's materials without properly evaluating their content, using a more emotional style to increase audience involvement. By doing so, you risk sacrificing truth in exchange for success. What is success worth if it is built on the spread of lies, manipulation and degradation?

I suggest that you artificially limit yourself to such old protocols and formats that create high costs. This will force you to draw attention to your materials due to the quality of their content, rather than form or quantity. Complexity will allow you to choose your words more selectively, because you can re-read materials before publishing and even bring in another person for a fresh perspective. However, you don’t need to completely get rid of social networks. Just post only links or copies of materials there. Your audience will likely be smaller at first, but will be more active and engaged. Past generations have used such technologies, but this has not stopped them from having a great impact on our world. Next I'll look at a few examples.

Own website

To create a website, you need to master HTML and CSS (although you can do without styles). Hosting is possible on your own server. It will cost you very little, about a few dollars a month. In this case, I recommend using Nginx. Previously{1}we described in detail the server administration process. You will also need a domain name. As a reliable registrar that is not subject to censorship, I recommend Epik[2]. It is possible to host without the cost of payment and server administration, for example on Netlify[3]or GitHub Pages[4] , however, be aware of the possibility of censorship. In any case, I recommend using your own domain name, otherwise you will be completely dependent on the censorship policy of the service.

To keep your website minimalistic, I recommend not focusing too much on the appearance. Avoid using JavaScript. Join 1MB Club[5] and no-JS Club[6]. However, don't ignore the really important modern practices like IPv6, HTTPS security, standards compliance. You will be helped by the tools that we previously talked about in the article “Website analysis tools”{7}.

RSS and Atom News Feeds

These standards allow you to read periodically published publications without visiting websites, without JavaScript, without specifying your data somewhere. The feed author simply publishes a periodically updated XML document to a fixed URL. Creating such a document is not difficult, you just need to follow the RSS[8] and Atom[9]< standards a i=4>. The simplicity and privacy of these formats allows them to remain very popular today. Many news sites and even social networks have such feeds. There are a lot of programs for reading news feeds, but I use the proprietary Feedly[10].

Gopher and Gemini

Gopher is the predecessor to HTTP, introduced in 1991. Mainly used for simple text content with hyperlinks. Such documents can even be viewed in text-based terminal browsers such as Lynx. There are still a lot of resources available using this protocol, although it is quite inconvenient by modern standards: it does not support various text encodings well, is designed for a fixed screen width, which makes paragraphing difficult on mobile devices, does not have security like TLS, and does not support identification content type using MIME.

Gemini is a new protocol inspired by the minimalism of Gopher, but eliminating all the shortcomings outlined above. To create documents, a very simple gemtext[11] markup language is used. To distribute content from your server, use Molly Brown[12] software. To view pages in Gemini, I recommend the text terminal browser Amfora[13].

Email distribution

Despite the prevalence of instant messaging and social networks, email remains a popular means of communication due to its asynchronous nature. The user chooses when to read letters and respond to them. Email standards (SMTP, IMAP) are free, and there are many implementations of server and client software. I usually use Postfix, Dovecot, Mozilla Thunderbird and Mutt.

E-mail can also be used for periodic publications. The experience will be similar to reading RSS and Atom feeds. However, due to the antiquity and complexity of the standards, email is susceptible to the problem of spam, and setting up your own mail server, and especially a mailing list, can be problematic. Therefore, the easiest way is to use third-party services that specialize in such services. If you still decide to implement the mailing yourself, then pay attention to the software mlmmj[14].

Paper publications and more

Finally, you can stop using digital and electronic technologies altogether. This option has the highest costs, but is also the most valued. And costs vary depending on the format, quality of paper, and binding. In addition, it is sometimes easier to raise money for a paper publication: people are more willing to pay for a material product than for information.

The easiest way is to join an existing handicraft print publication (samizdat), the topic of which is close to you. Here even the thoughts that you want to convey fade into the background. You become a participant in a collective action that has tangible results in the material world. Isn’t that the point of exchanging information? However, if you decide to launch your own publication just for your materials, this will also be a collective action. The reader is a participant in the process. This is especially noticeable precisely when he has to make some effort to obtain information. The greater this effort, the more confident you are that your content is valuable to your audience.

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