What we have here, is a little cancel culture fun goin' on ;) Let's play paint the asshats into a corner, shall we? You decide which folks get loaded on the train to oblivion okay? What I'm really upset about here, is the fact that the last bambi I murdered for food got incinerated coz I couldn't get it down off the mountaiin when my part of the mountain was engulfed by the fires. I barely made it out myself, and were it not for a grower who knew I was probably still on the mountain and completely unaware of the evacuation orders, I would have been cooked myself. So I come back, to what, this? Hey I took couple of glances at the list and how the Gemini space has grown, along with the explosive adoption of this experimental protocol and though to myself, "Man, it's still in the spirit of the old NSFnet AUP - that's awesome. Now I learn that someone is disrespecting me. This will not stand. For the better part of two decades, my friends and colleagues on the Gopher list have chided me for my refusal to accept proxies which permit people to use HTTP protocol to access my gopherholes. Yet in that time, I have NEVER come accross an administrator who outright refused to accept my personal **choice** to disallow such proxies to invade my network space. It may be not in alignment with what others have wanted, in order to repopularize the Gopher protocol, but I am, and always have been, a firm believer that if you want to surf any protocol space, then you should use the tools specifically designed for those purposes. I lamented the removal of Gopher protocol from the **browsers*, and subesquently, cogitated over why one would even bother having an http:// in the address bar if that's ultimately going to be the only supported method of browsing, all of this while Geocities went lights out and Angelfire stopped showing up in SERPs... and people became the dopamine enslaved property of private enterprise that butcherd and packaged and wrapped us in celophane with a price tag as they placed us into inventory. So here comes this new thang using TCP 1965 and I'm like, "Okay, kewl! That's how we extend Gopher to a new beginning without damaging it or crippling the backward compatibility of it, and we can leave port 70 alone, without losing what is so great about the protocol!" >From the lessons learned in hindsight with respect to functionality and utility, Gemini introduced a novel methodology that is, or at least was until a couple of days ago, adventerous, experimental, with that sensible utility and above all, not afraid to examine ideas and kick them around a bit. I was so excited when the first time Gemini space delivered to me an almost discernable ANSI graphics file. I know most of you weren't even born when that was a thing, long before most everyone here was privy to ARPANET access. But it was a big deal for me. And now, instead of simply discussing the virtues that include the pros and cons, with demonstrated test cases, some latecomers are showing up, drawing lines in the sand with their divisive sticks, and making threats against the people who have put in the hard work and actually built Gemini in the first place? How dare you? To see the creators and original pioneers, so to speak, of the Gemini protocol threatened and bullied like this? Especially the gentlemen whose servers most everyone in Gemini space actually run themselves? I dunno what Faceplant taught y'all, but if it was kneejerk reactions are something you think is a noble thing then maybe you learned well, and maybe you should just keep on Faceplanting and cutting off a few more pounds of flesh for Google, and those who would refuse to respect the wishes of server admins that don't want their services bastardized by proxies delivering their content to people in HTTP space. Now, threatening people like the authors of Amfora, and Jetforce, and GLV-1.12556 (the first ever Gemini server)? Man that's not just bad form, it's borderline ad homonym - a bannable offense in most treatises of netiquette. The people I've just mentioned are the people who made possible your very enjoyment of this novel service answering on TCP 1965, and you have the audacity to dangle deplatforming at them? Do you wish to incite a Hatfield and McCoy like volley? I don't think so. Chill, have a crumpet, watch an old episode of Lost in Space, or listen to a a good death metal band live in concert, or a string quartet performing Bach - whatever floats your boat and takes you to that happy place of yours. If you don't, everyone will end up with urine on their pant legs and that's stinky, to say the least. Now, I've personally just discovered Lagrange, and I must say I'm enamored of it. It fricken' rocks and at this time is my goto GUI client for Gemini (and Gopher). My fav is however, still Elpher, and no, I'm still a Vim guy, but that's okay. I've seen people rave about how kewl other clients are, some I like, some I feel are lacking with respect to my needs, and ALL of that is okay. I even prefer using some really rickety old and unmaintained CLI based clients. So let's talk not talk about ultimatums, but instead, about choices. About user choices and about server admin choices and the rules they adopt as their acceptable use policies. If a server admin says, "You can't put up content on my servers with favicons - then fricken' don't do that! but don't be an asshat and say you'll ban the IPs of people using clients that support a feature you can otherwise prohibit your respective userbase as part of your terms of service, or threaten to lobby for the deplatforming of well meaning, enthusiastic developers - that's childish, that's juvenile, that's moronic. That's as stupid as the crippleware that Tusky became when it violated the philosophy of FOSS and user empowerment by hardcoding philosophy into the client. You take away the empowerment of the user and you're no better than Dorsey or Ellison or Zuckerberg or ABC... Don't be evil my ass, that's exactly what ABC has become. If a user says, I don't want favicons coz I'll get tracked (ridiculous reasoning, but as valid as any other preference), then either use a client that doesn't support that or find the dev of your fav client and ask them if they'll integrate such configurability into their client that allows you to hold the pickles and lettuce. Special orders really don't upset them, and if you do it in the form of a patch or pull request, even better! You need to realize that you're speaking to creators - people who like to build things, and more often than not, it actually makes their day when they know someone likes their product enough to ask for a feature to be added. That's actually flattery man!, Flatter them. Thank them. Let them know, as a consumer of their products that you have things you think would be beneficial. That's how you affect change. Or you can threaten. And cancel yourself. The truth about tracking, is that you can't do anything about stopping a provider from attempting to do so. You're in their syslogs, their firewall logs, and they can fingerprint you from other remote resources. No one, that I'm aware of here, is interested in tracking anyone in Gemini space. That will not always be the case, and already there are those who are in earnest betrayal of the trust of this community, and as is typical, those people are the individuals that are clamoring the loudest for control, slinging threats, and engaging in ad homonym. I'm seeing all kinds of new ideas and proposals and questions put into experimentation for feasibility and that's part of what Project Gemini is about (for example: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~ew/2020/20201217-towards-a-proper-flightlog-4.gmi ), some fly, some don't. Some are adopted even though the use cases are narrow while others are popular and detested by many - for those latter cases, we have three choices, that of user configurability, that of server administrative policy, and official canonization into the spec. That third item of remediation is, of course, the weakest of all remedies when a popular functionality is the topic. Anyone can fork an existing project and launch a death star. Don't kid yourselves, and it will happen. It already has actually, there's a Richard Cranium out there in Gemini space disrespecting robots.txt - and that's a very real, clear, and imminent threat to privacy. I hope that helps :) -- Bradley D. Thornton Manager Network Services http://NorthTech.US TEL: +1.310.421.8268
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