Announcing Phobos

Published: 2026-05-15

In an insomanic night not long ago, I came across nightfall.city and what is left of it in geminispace. If you're unfamiliar with it, check out the website[1] as the gemsite is sadly not reachable.

https://nightfall.city

I instantly fell in love with the concept. I don't know if that's a one of a kind thing or if there's a word for that sort of site. Anyway I thought to myself, of cause, a terrestrial city can't seem to work in geminispace and in a spree of wrestling with my first attempts at making ascii art and whatever today's brainfog allows me to write, I came up with Phobos Station[2]

Phobos Station

What is this?

Okay, I think exploring is better than reading my explanation but as of now, there isn't much to explore so let me explain.

The Station is the remains of a mining station on the Mars moon Phobos. After the workers liberated themselves and created an independent living space for themselves, people interested are invited to move in.

The two living districts will list their inhabitants with a short description and the link to their capsule. So if you choose to move in, maybe others do so as well and you might have neighbors to get to know.

Every living district will have a feed aggregating the gemfeeds of its inhabitants and there is a radio room where those feeds come together.

Now, in a perfect world, Phobos won't remain the only free station in the solar system and we establish fixed routes between stations, accessible via the spaceport, and collect their transmissions in the radio room.

And who knows, maybe there is a demand to expand the station and add another living district, or someone wants to put up a messageboard in their hood or other goodies. All of this is doable.

Of cause I hope cool people flock in and we have a handful of stations on which like minded people find each other and become friends and you know, give geminispace sort of a topology, a map one can navigate. And if not, it was still fun to write and I learned a bit on how to make ascii art in vim.

Keep in mind that at the moment, none of this is running any code. It's just static gemtext and me, checking my mailbox for requests.

Yours truly,

Ranja, Phoebe's Janitor.

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