Recently I've wound up looking for new places on the internet again, given that it seems like the internet is becoming an even more controlled space. Last february I happened to be working on a personal site of sorts and put up a minimalistic forum for my friends to use. Discord was doing its thing again, trying to implement age verification which everybody hated and had people running for different platforms. A couple of friends tried it out, but no one really stuck. It's just not what people want apparently. I even tried giving it a retro flair for character but that's not enough to justify it.

That really sucks because now I have to subject myself to the antics of these platforms in order to stay in touch with friends. I'm already bummed that the form of long-form content on the internet has simmered out in favor of short tweets and instant messaging. Not that long-form content is inherently better than short-form content, it's rather that people seem to put more thought and effort in their posts when they're allowed to be longer.

I stumbled upon A-Net after some searching, I figured maybe there'd be a way to have a website that hooks into all sorts of protocols like HTTP, SSH, Gemini (not the chatbot) and so forth so that anybody can stay up to date through whichever medium they prefer. That sort of accessibility always seemed like the thing I was missing from a lot of modern day services. Half the websites just won't work without JavaScript being turned on and you gotta use one out of three browsers. It's really cool that A-Net is doing this out of the box, I think that's a pretty big selling point (at least for me).

I read on the github page it's coming out on august 1st? I might just poke around with a test BBS myself. Perhaps I'll replace my personal site with it, will have to see how that goes. Thank you guys for making something really cool either way.