The urban-rural divide is larger than ever and growing. Below is a ramble about my rural upbringing and how it sucked.

Preamble: A Rural Upbringing

I was born and raised in an extremely rural area. My parents wanted the extra land that comes with a rural area and moved from an area of a city experiencing extreme urban decay. The village I was raised in had a population of less than two hundred and the house my parents moved into in the early 2010s has its nearest neighbour about a kilometre away from anyone else. When I finished school, my graduating class was less than fifty people. I did well in school, so I managed to get accepted to a higher-tier university. There was one major thing, though, that would be a whole new world for my sheltered life: It would be in the city.

Yeah, if you wanna find love then you know where the city is

I had been to the city before, usually about annually when we would need something that was not available in our area (basically anything specialised). It would be a complete culture shock to someone like me who already had problems dealing with people in a rural environment. I did it anyway, the education opportunity would definitely be worth it. So I moved.

I left behind everything and everyone I grew up with to move to the city. To me, it was a way to start a new life. I never fit in with the other kids. I was not from here unlike everyone that had family there for centuries. My parents were not religious while the town was very much so. I had no interest in the outdoors, preferring to spend my free time inside on a computer. Beginning again seemed like a good way to maybe finally be normal. I was wrong.

My first year of university was miserable. The difficulty spike of the classwork, my already bad social anxiety compounded with not knowing anyone and feeling lost on my own for the first time lead me down dark paths. Maybe the second year would be better?

My second year of university started out much the same as the first, but I had a maths class that involved small group work. I naturally gravitated towards the back of any room I was in for class, as I liked being the first to get out when class was over. Bridging over a bunch of boring classwork, I ended up with a pair of really close friends. We would watch anime, play video games and drink almost every weekend. For once I felt pretty happy. When we went on winter break, everything seemed like it was going to be okay. The calendar then changed to 2020.

[Insert obligatory blame COVID on all my life problems] It was true though. The extreme isolation brought on by COVID did little to benefit me beyond giving me a reason to finally finish Legend of the Galactic Heroes (aside: strong recommend, especially if you are a fan of political dramas like A Song of Ice and Fire). We would still talk over the Internet, but it was nowhere near the same. Through 2022 we barely talked. Then I graduated.

When I graduated, I was completely unable to find a job. I was not able to find an internship (which can in 2020 be credibly blamed on COVID, after that no) and could not compete with all of the other graduates in my rapidly saturating field. Thankfully, one of my parents helped me find a job at a local factory. That is, local to them. I would have to move back. Moving back seemed like a good idea. It would be way cheaper than an apartment in the city, and I could get everything together before I eventually move back out. Again, I was wrong.

It turns out that job was awful. It started out fine. I rarely was given things to do but it would at least give me that extremely valuable experience. This excuse would rapidly fall apart as I would spend months at a time doing nothing. By the time I finally left I actively hated every day I had to go into the office, would spend most of the day with the computer not even turned on, and the last week I just was not there after lunch. Thankfully, my other parent helped me find another job. Sure, I would take a significant pay cut and the job was absolutely nothing that I wanted to do, but it is a remote job! In a surprise to no one, this was also a terrible idea.

Fast forward a year and I once again hate every single day I go to my work computer doing a fake job I hate. I spend about 0 hours a day actually doing my job. This time, though, I have no easy out. I am on my own trying to find a job in a terrible market that is even worse in a rural area like I am now. But, there could be an escape. I would just have to go back to the city.

It is painfully obvious I need a new job. It is even more obvious I need to move out. But will moving out actually help? No one knows yet.

Rural Life: Not for Everyone, Definitely not Me

“But why would you want to move to the city? Are you not a social recluse?” You probably thought when reading this. That is a fair point; certain Internet grifter circles love romanticising the quiet life away from everything bad about cities. They are wrong.

To me, the city is a place I can go and fit in by being a nobody. When you are in a train or walking around few will notice you beyond existing but you definitely exist. There is just something about people watching that I find enjoyment out of. It probably also does not help that I have an irrational hatred of cars stemming from a bad accident I was in when I was sixteen, so good public transit is a must for me. Sadly that means most rural areas are out of the picture when it comes to that.

Rural Decay

Most of the towns near where I grew up (and currently live) have been in terminal decline since deindustrialisation and internationalism started. The population has been going down nearby for decades. Most if not all of the properties in the “down town” of the nearby town are on sale and have been for years. The small city nearby, seemingly saved by the university it has in town that has a record enrolment, has not been much better. Part of the area gentrified while the rest went to nothing. Most of the businesses moved out decades ago but the few that remain get folded into conglomerates or go out of business.

I have not gone into the nearby town in years, but when driving by it is hard to not almost break down looking at the sad state of everything. Ruralites are being left behind. The urbanites fleeing “urbanity” with their young children then grow old and get left behind as those children raised in rural areas move back to urban areas for the jobs and education. The median age here is easily over 50. If you are younger than 40 you will be by far the youngest person there, unless someone in their 40s brought their young kids. Being between 20 and 40 though, you will be hard to find anyone that did not leave as soon as they could. Teenagers would be bored out of their minds and usually turned to drugs and alcohol because there was nothing else to do. All of the older people (there are many) are always happy to see someone young, to feel like their dying community might survive beyond them. In all likelihood, it will not.

Divide

Reiterating on the hook sentence: the urban-rural divide is extreme. Urban areas get all of the attention and all of the investment. Urban areas are far more left-wing than the conservative rural areas. Some extremely rural areas feel like remnants of long bygone eras. Some feel like they are trying to modernise and attempt to attract the increasingly rare remote worker getting away from the increasing costs of urban living. The divide is real. People post meme images from young people on Reddit that feel uncomfortable in rural areas. The increasingly elderly countryside gets left completely behind by the younger and faster paced city. It's all a mess.

Epilogue

I have been in a bad place the past two years, ever since I moved back in with my parents. I have since gone nearly full hikkikomori, leaving the house about every other month. It has been extremely detrimental for my physical and mental health. I know I need to escape to the city. I would have friends again. I would be free of my parents again, only back when I want to be. I would be able to be on my own again.

I could once again be free.

if it's even actually decentralised in the first place

alternative titles: – The Corporations Already Won [over the Internet] – I Attempt to Justify my Irrational Hatred of Discord in the Form of a Pointless Rant

I hate most centralised software. Anyone who has the misfortune of knowing me knows I hate most centralised software. My personal website has links to de facto decentralised forms of communication. I have a Twitter account I refuse to post on or even look at the 2 times a month I look at cute Japanese cats. I have a Discord account I will never ever advertise beyond a few friends that refuse to use anything other than Discord. GitHub is full of faults but it's probably one of the least bad, though I will laugh every time some new cargo cult (read: Rust, Nix, Deno [DISCLAIMER: I actually like Deno]) is extremely heavily reliant on GitHub. Video bandwidth is so infeasible that monoliths like YouTube come into sole existence because of massive corporations like Google.

Using Discord as a bug tracker(?)

This rant got inspired when I was looking at the documentation page for an alpha of a software I quite like. One of the first things on their contributing page for issues was this (paraphrased):

If you find a bug, please let us know [..] on Discord.

Wait, what?

You want to not use GitHub issues, something extremely easily searchable and indexable, for DISCORD? The reason given (on a GitHub issue, lmao) is because (paraphrasing again):

to reduce noise [...] and keep all the information in one place.

My siblings in Christ, you already have a place where you can keep all the information in one place. It's even centralised, and you already use it. It's called GitHub. You can even use GitHub's silly Discussion feature and segregate alphas into its own category. Why in the name of advertiser friendly content would you EVER need to only use Discord?

It's the convenience, isn't it? You already live on Discord so why not make others too. Well, tell that to anyone on an IPv6 only network, all 3 of them. (Not that they would be able to use GitHub, either...)

Aside: Using Discord as a ticketing system(??????)

Bluesky recently started its “federation” programme. To sign-up to their allowwhitelist, you had to do one simple thing: Sign up! ...to their Discord server. That includes making tickets to get allowed in. Yes, apparently some insane person made a ticketing system for Discord. Why would someone ever need such a thing?

I don't know but programmers seem to exclusively live on Twitter and Discord, occasionally travelling to other dumpsters like Reddit or GitHub when their usual caves start to rot.

TL;DR: I hate Discord and absolutely fucking despise being forced to use it.

Alternatives exist!

There are alternatives to all of this highly centralised corporate slop!

• Matrix exists to get rid of Discord! (and is still heavily tied to the mother instance of matrix.org)
  • Though I should mention outside of the freak FOSS space no one actually uses it, they all use Discord.
• The Fediverse/Nostr (if you're really weird)/Bluesky (if you're an American leftist) exist to get rid of Twitter!
  • Though despite how many people complain about it most big software projects still exclusively use it.
• Gitea/Forgejo exist to get rid of GitHub!
  • Honestly, no complaints here. I love Gitea and Forgejo (though not Forgejo's name).
  • Apart from the typical decentralised problem: lack of reach.

Lack of Reach: The Decentralised/Alternative Ouroboros

this is a strawman I won't use decentralised software because I don't know anyone else that does/no one else will leave with me/will think I am weird for not using the central alternative!

The central problem with decentralised software is [it seems like] that no one actually wants to use it. Want to contribute to software projects? Sign up to GitHub. Want to chat with your friends or those software developers? Sign up to Discord. Want to post cats and complain about American politics? The Twitter dumpster fire welcomes you. It's easy because it's advertised and everyone else already does it. The decentralised problem is typically many of them are the 2018 Hacker News “Uber for X” but for decentralised software. – Why would most people ever use “Discord but decentralised” when Discord exists and people are using it? – Why would most people ever use “Twitter but decentralised” when Twitter exists and people are using it? – Why would most people ever use “GitHub but decentralised” when GitHub exists and people are using it? Non-technical people don't give a shit about centralisation. If they did, Cloudflare would have gone bankrupt in 2013.

Decentralised software will never catch on because it did not already. Unless it becomes such a killer app it will dethrone any alternative like what Discord did to Skype in the mid-2010s, lovely projects like Matrix and Gitea/Forgejo will rot in the sidelines while their corporate competition continues to curb stomp it into irrelevancy.

Some Decentralised Software is Actually Centralised

I really like Matrix. I help host a Synapse server. I also host a personal Dendrite server and have all the bridges set up. But good luck trying to use Matrix and trying to avoid matrix.org. The flagship instance is so utterly massive that trying to block it is a very easy way to shoot oneself in the foot. The same could be said of Mastodon with mastodon.social and Misskey with misskey.jp. Bluesky doesn't even pretend it's currently decentralised. Good luck using that behind an IPv6-only network! Pay up for those IPv4 addresses!!

Also please unblock me I only did one joke please

Yes, you could avoid them (or get blocked by them for simply no reason), but then your potential outreach falls of a cliff. The Ouroboros eats its tail.

An Attempt at a Conclusion

I love decentralised software. I host everything that I use beyond the servers myself, from the DNS nameservers resolving my domains to the blogging software you are currently reading this on. I was excited by Bluesky before I ever opened the “What's Hot” feed. I got excited by the fediverse before I realised it was just a group of cliques that hate each other for no reason other than existing and guilt-by-association. I use Matrix everyday, even though like 90% of the time it's to message my boyfriend. (Love you, Grumb!)

But no one else I know does. They post Twitter screencaps on Discord. Not that I want to control them, they're their own people and make their own decisions. Many of them burnt out of the fediverse even harder than I ever could. We tried Matrix but the Discord bridge broke and the only person who had access to it just didn't care about Matrix enough to want to ever fix it. Don't get me started on my few real life friends, they're even worse.

Decentralised software exists and can be lovely and sometimes objectively better than its more popular centralised counterpart (though getting stabbed will be a better experience than using Twitter and graffiti on a wall is probably more searchable than anything on Discord ever will) but won't catch on because of the ouroboros of convenience/no one else using it.

an ode to my best friend of 15 years

i remember the good times in 2009, when we were young and all was fun the time when my mother said “only pick one” but i could not say no to you so we came home with two

the first was friendly to all, always wanting attention but you only liked me when we moved house you would only let me accompany you as we drove into the unknown

as we grew up, we changed you grew more friendly to others but still you always preferred my side while i got older, and moved out i always had a picture of you on my desk

anytime i came home i was always happy to see you growing old so peacefully i got older too what fun that brought

no matter what no matter when you would always be there to cheer me up i wished you could always be there for me but life is not like that

—

now you are at the end of your life it is hard to see you this way so small so frail so precious It hurts us all watching you like this.

i hope you are in a better place now where you can stretch out all you want where you can eat all of the shredded cheese you want where you can enjoy being loved as long as you want where you can finally be at peace

when the bad times happen it is hard to remember the good but there were so many memories and i will never forget that

i love you, now and forever and it hurts to see you go but it happens to all of us eventually

i hope you cherish your eternal slumber eventually i will be there too, together once more

see you, space kitty ~

I have completely checked out of reality the past several months.

Not much has changed since then. I quit my old job and got a new one. I work from home now. I like it so much I never want to go back to an office.

Since I disappeared, where did I go? Nowhere.

I've felt completely burnt out from everything I did for the nearly 2 years I was around for a long time. Honestly, I still feel that way. For the first and only time in my life, I can confidently say that Drew DeVault was right about something. (the inherent toxicity of the fediverse [and most “social media”]) Social media delenda est. No one will listen anyway.

I've barely had the motivation to do anything outside of what I need to do to survive. My few things that could be called “projects” have stagnated. And that's fine. No one uses them anyway.

It's fine. Everything is fine. I'm (not) fine. Not that it matters anyway.

I've already disappeared. I've already done what I wanted. That's all I wanted anyway.

I, like most of my cohorts, have decided to shut down our Pleroma/Akkoma/whatever the fuck instances down. I, personally, don't want it to be permanent but for some of my closest friends it is. While saddening, it came almost entirely as expected. *oma is horrible software written in a horrible language by horrible people that was not fun to poke around in trying to fix. The fediverse was fun once, and then just stagnated. Doesn't help that many of them (if you're reading this, I'm not talking about you) are genuinely insufferable.

It's sad to see anyone or anything go. It's even more sad when the reasons why someone goes completely make sense. It's awful that it had to end like this, but it was going to happen sooner or later. I doubt anything new will save us either, bluesky is still completely centralised and it's run by a different breed of garbage people. While them actually getting paid for their work definitely will bring higher quality work, the reference implementation relies on AWS and is currently nowhere near actually usable by anyone other than the select few they invite. Maybe I'll be wrong. I don't have my hopes up.

Froth.zone is closed until further notice. I do plan on bringing it back if and only if all this blows over, maybe as just the API for archival and XMPP purposes. I'm shutting it down for multiple reasons: solidarity with my friends, a recent complete lack of interest, a dislike of a stagnant community full of infighting, and a lack of time. Nothing else will go away anytime soon. I have no plans to get rid of anything else.

If, for some reason, any of you want to contact me, I will still be on Matrix, discord, email, XMPP, and basically everything else I was on too. I'm not going anywhere. Maybe we'll meet again. Don't know where. Don't know when. But we'll meet again, some sunny day.

So long, and thanks for all the fish, Sam

PS: I have decided to archive all of my git repos involving the fediverse. I will unarchive them if I ever come back. I have 0 plans on ever deleting them.

Where have you been? It's alright, we know where you've been

---

Schizophrenia below, please ignore.

What is the Machine?

The Machine is everything. The Machine is all-consuming. It would be better to ask what the Machine isn't. The Machine turns everyone into a cog for the Machine. The cogs only exist to further the Machine. The Machine knows this, the cogs are expendable. The Machine knows cogs don't need personality. The Machine knows cogs don't need independent thought. Cogs serve one purpose: keep the Machine alive.

The Cogs

Cogs don't last forever, so the Machine needs to replace them. How does the Machine replace cogs? Simple: it forges new ones. The youth of the world are shaped by the Machine to become cogs. These cogs will go onto propagate the Machine for another generation, before recruiting a new generation of cogs to join in their places. Without new cogs, the Machine will break. The Machine knows this. The Machine goes to great lengths to make sure that it cannot collapse.

Is there an Escape?

No, you cannot escape the Machine. The Machine knows where you are. The Machine knows what you want. The Machine knows what you have. The Machine knows how to distract you. The Machine knows how to break you. The Machine knows that you dislike the Machine. The Machine is not afraid of you. The Machine cannot be afraid of you, it's not a real thing. Right?

Living with the Machine

Can one live in the Machine without becoming a faceless cog? Can one live in the Machine without helping it continue its destruction? Can one live in the Machine and remain sane? Will the Machine outlive modernity? Or, is modernity the Machine?

No one will know. Is there a life beyond the Machine? No one will know.