💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~bencollver › why-gemini.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:16:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I feel enthusiastic about the community of gemini users, not about
the protocols and software involved. Spiritually, a user focus seems
to be a better foundation than a technology focus, especially for
building a community of creative people (artists, hackers, musicians,
writers, and so forth).
From about December, 2017 through May, 2018, i experimented with
converting my personal web site to gopher content. This worked great
because of the free pre-configured gopher hosting on devio.us. Then
devio.us went offline for about a month.
In June, 2018, i moved my gopher content to free web hosting on
bitbucket.io. Thanks to git, i could edit my content offline and
push to the server as desired. I left much of my content in
plaintext format, such as the log. It was not a blog because it was
not in HTML. Then i learned that Google does not index .txt files.
In February, 2022, i decided to hop on the gemini, the Smol Internet,
and suckless bandwagon. I was delighted to find that Gemini is
basically using what i was already doing: markdown-style plaintext.
Gemini is basically Gopher plus MIME types, SSL, and Unicode. It
is intentionally in-your-face about being non-commercial. Works for
me!
Below are some notes in chronological order.
"Gopher is the information without the flair, the HTML without the
Javascript. Gopher gives me what I want when what I want is to read
stuff, not like/comment/interact/favorite/share etc. I'm a big fan
of all of those things, but sometimes I just want to read a thing on
an old computer and follow a few links. Gopher lets me do that.
It's ultimate Old Web and I am one of those ultimate Old Web ladies
who still uses Lynx occasionally..."
--Jessamyn C. West
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kwek8/long-live-gopher-the-techies-keeping-the-text-driven-internet-alive
https://plaintextproject.online/
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.txt
Decades ago i used Elfwood's random art feature to find budding new
artists. Then i used a similar feature on Deviantart, which worked
great until the developers removed it in 2020. Now it is a more
guided and walled-in experience. Similar to Google fully filling the
first page of results with ads. I miss the purity of the RNG (random
number generator) and the non-commercial culture of the old-school
Internet.
https://mastodon.art/public
Fascinating video about the Dead Internet Theory, Potemkin Villages,
and Internet Rot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FtPvDGrpkA
I have seen Potemkin Villages referred to as Reality Sleeves.
http://hart.pglaf.org/reality.sleeves
https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/old-internet-coming-back.html
See also the alternative Search Engines included in the
Yesterweb Links:
https://yesterweb.org/link-directory/
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/
"Advertising provides critical support for the Web. ... For the last
few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly
Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion
measurement... IPA aims to provide advertisers with the ability to
perform attribution while providing strong privacy guarantees."
"Unfortunately the modern web is the perfect definition of bloated
software, and you cannot really get stuff done without it. At
minimum, it's needed for banking, government documents, and
e-learning/collaboration platforms."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29379315
... loss of privacy is related to loss of agency: that is, loss of
our ability to make our own choices, pursue our own interests, and be
master of our own attention.
I was recently startled at how much excitement there was when Github
introduced "dark mode". Yes, Github now offers two colors on its
interface. Already back in the 80s and 90s, many DOS programs had
more options than that.
Git is a decentralized protocol, but Github has managed to make it
centralized.
https://www.complete.org/recovering-our-lost-free-will-online-tools-and-techniques-that-are-available-now/
"Now that even Mozilla is in bed with the advertising 'industry'
(looking to appease those who track and profile people) we need to
gradually move away from the Web, at least to the extent feasible.
There are almost no benign players (with clout and significance) left
on the Web."
http://techrights.org/2022/02/16/news-over-geminispace/
I'm not saying that this particular attempt to privacy-wash online
tracking is awful but, let's face it... Facebook/Meta is involved and
Mozilla has lost their collective spines. It's abundantly clear that
their actions are in opposition to their proclaimed ethics.
In short it's [hypocrisy] and it's disapppointing.
From:
gemini://drskrzyk.com/gemlog/2022-02-17-mozilla-disappointment.gmi
Facebook is evil. Google is evil now too. Being on the Web is
scientifically proven to be damaging to your mental health, which
Facebook actively experiments on. Also, they're selling all of your
information to advertisers, your insurance company, and anyone else
who will give them a nickel or two.
People in bars keep trying to talk to me about Bitcoin when they hear
I'm a computer person. People with business degrees and no
programming ability show up to hackathons trying to get a prototype
for their startup idea made for free. I go to a computer music
hackathon and it happens there too.
gemini://anachronauts.club/~sage/log/2021-01-30-why-anachronauts.gmi