Scattered thoughts on permanent availability
- Very stressed out about how notifications seem to be able to reach me all 24 hours of the day
- This has led me to wonder how many of the things I do on the computer or on my phone need a permanent internet connection and then, how many of the things that are hosted on a remote perma-online server need to be
- Reliable inboxes and corkboards, which are terms I just pulled out of my ass to describe things like an antenna that should always be on the lookout for an urgent message and cannot fetch anything if it's not retrieved at the moment it was sent, and information that needs to be seen and if necessary copied to a local machine but needs to be available at short notice.
- You need to be online to, say, have a live voice call, but you could spin up a temporary online server then and kill the process after you're done, and just schedule the call instead of having the service be constantly available, which is incredibly resource intensive.
- Same with sending a file to someone, you could schedule a retrieval time so that it wouldn't have to be stored online and it could be a live transmission.
- This thought that things are not permanently available "just in case" makes me vaguely panicky and I know it's a feeling I should grapple with