💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~bencollver › why-gemini.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 21:01:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
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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
Reasons people use Gemini:
Nytpu's article about why people use Gemini
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
This is an older screenshot taken from my wife's phone during an attempt at reading an article. I measured the amount of actual readable content. It's not even 15% of the screen.
Brereton told me recently that his frustration began in late 2020.
I was browsing the Internet one day, and I began to feel like something was just off," he said. "A lot of the content doesn't feel authentic--it doesn't feel real." He sounded bemused by the runaway popularity of his post, which was part of a personal research project on how information is organized online. Better information could be found on social media, discussion boards, and small-scale personal blogs, but Google Search was deprioritizing those platforms in favor of corporate Web sites, which could afford the money and effort it takes to optimize for Google's search algorithm. "The authentic Web" seemed hidden, Brereton said. "The algorithms tell us what to read.
What Google Search Isn't Showing You
Mozilla's client applications do not collect information about WiFi access points whose SSID is hidden or ends with the string "_nomap". If you would like to prevent your WiFi access point from being reported to this service, you can rename your SSID to append "_nomap" to the name (e.g., SSID "MyWirelessNetwork" becomes "MyWirelessNetwork_nomap") or configure your SSID to be hidden.
... many of the goals of OAUTH2 are valid and worthwhile: my problems with it are exclusively to do with how it has been implemented. In my nearly thirty-five years of writing software in service of the Internet, OAUTH2 is the worst-conceived piece of software design I have ever encountered. More troublingly, it shows the increasing levels of control and power exercised by large, usually American corporations over the Internet, and the almost complete disregard they have for its historical openness and inclusiveness. OAUTH2 is a major step on the way to an Internet where the only players are large corporations, serving their own interests in the name of profit and power.
... I have today attempted to submit my application, Pegasus Mail, to GMail to go through their "validation process". But right at the end is the sucker punch--Google will charge you from "$10,000 to $75,000 or more" (their words, not mine) for this, and will require you to go through the process (and of course, pay the fee) annually.
OAUTH2 criticism from Pegasus Mail developer
A typical website visit in 2022
1. Figure out how to decline all but essential cookies
2. Close the support widget asking if I need help
3. Stop the auto-playing video
4. Close the "subscribe to our newsletter" popup
5. Try and remember why I came here in the first place
--Andy Budd