💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001643.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:44:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Matthew Graybosch hello at matthewgraybosch.com
Sun Jun 14 00:30:19 BST 2020
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On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 20:56:35 +0000solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:
I *do* like the idea of naming it titan://...
Thanks. I honestly just couldn't resist.
5. ...I'm wary that facilitating "user friendly" Gemini hosts which
anybody can post to using a client carries a very real risk of
fostering a culture of dependency where people don't know how to do
anything not offered as a feature by their provider, who has the
ability to change, remove, or charge for those featurs, and also of
pushing us toward a more centralised Geminispace where large numbers
of users congregate on a small number of servers which make
themselves especially appealing to non-technical users.
6. Does anybody else feel like we are just instinctively
re-implementing the familiar history of the web without much caution
or critical thought?
That's been nagging at me as well. TBH, I'm not actually comfortablewith the seeming necessity of public hosts like tanelorn.city to getpeople creating and publishing gemini content. I'm not used to askingpeople to trust me like this, and I'm not comfortable with the power Ihave over people using tanelorn.city.
Let's be honest; it shouldn't be that hard to run a gemini daemon outof a personal computer in your own home, whether it's your main desktopor just a raspberry pi. The protocol is light enough that CPU andmemory usage should be next to nothing compared to Firefox or Chrome.
It probably wouldn't be that hard for a compentent Windows or OSXdeveloper to create a graphical app suitable for people who aren'tsysadmins that published an arbitrary directory and starts up againwhenever their PC or Mac reboots. The nature of the protocol all butguarantees that.
I think the biggest problem, at least in the US, is that ISPs seemhellbent on keeping residential internet users from using theirconnections for anything but consumption. You've got to use a dynamicDNS service like no-ip.com, and even if you manage that you might stillfind yourself getting cut off over a TOS violation. People arethoroughly conditioned toward using the internet as glorified cable TV,and only expressing themselves on platforms they don't control.
Then there's DNS, domain names, ICAAN, etc. Maybe if we still used aUUCP-style addressing scheme like<country>.<province>.<city>.<neighborhood>.<hostname> it wouldn'tmatter what I called my host as long as the hostname was unique to the<neighborhood>. But instead we settled on <domain-name>.<tld>, whichneeds to be administered by registrars to ensure uniqueness, and domainregistration is yet more sysadmin stuff that most people don'tnecessarily have the time, skill, or inclination to deal with.
I would prefer that public hosts weren't necessary. I think thateverybody who wants to should be able to publish from their own devicewithout having to become a sysadmin. As long as operating a geminiservice remains the province of sysadmins, we're going to maintain thedivision between haves (sysadmins) and have nots (people who can't ordon't want to sysadmin) that prevented the web from becoming (orremaining) a democratic platform.
This became something of a political rant, and I probably should haveput it on demifiend.org instead. Sorry if this doesn't belong here; I'mposting this under a new subject so that it starts a new thread insteadof derailing the existing one.
-- Matthew Graybosch gemini://starbreaker.org#include <disclaimer.h> gemini://demifiend.orghttps://matthewgraybosch.com gemini://tanelorn.city"Out of order?! Even in the future nothing works."