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IDEA: Public Imageboard In Gemini

There was once a gemini capsule called iich.space, it was run by sk! and is now defunct. It was another chan board inspired by 2chan. Now I would not be talking about a capsule dead for months if it did not do something special that has not yet re-appeared in gemini. A public *image* board.

This anonymous image board section allowed you to upload images through the titan protocol, it would then dither the image and spit it out in a public feed. I loved this! The dithering aesthetic fits gemini and it was neat to see all the cool pictures uploaded. This kind of public picture hosting center is an awesome service that if properly focused and advertised as such could be a huge hit.

SK! station profile

Now defunct website (dead link, unfortunately no cache available)

Station post where I asked sk! how IICH dithering works

More On Dithering

What is Dithering?

image dithering is an extreme form of image compression that uses an array of colored dots to represent the image. There are many dithering compression styles and ways to do it. There was a lot of discussion on photo dithering at the start of the year but I havent seen much about it pop up lately.

Gemipedia article: dither

Dithering: an idea whose time has finally come? by mntn

Floyd-Steinberg dithering by marginalia

Gemipedia article: Floyd-Steinberg dithering

Basic photo editing recipes for the command line by lettuce

How did IICH dithering work?

I was very lucky to ask sk! about this when they were still active on station. I wish they had linked an email or xmpp so I could ask them further technical questions. Alas unless sk is still lurking and sees this thats probably not happening.

Transcription

Me: Hey @sk Would you mind telling me how you do photo dithering over at your image board?
SK!: For sure! it's not too interesting i'm afraid. it's just using imagemagick under the hood

https://github.com/imagemagick/imagemagick

the exact command i use is:
convert $INPUT -resize '512x512>' -ordered-dither o2x2,3 $OUTPUT
i played around with the various dithering strategies and i landed on ordered dithering. it may not be as accurately representative and well defined as the floyd-steinberg, but i just love the crosshatch aesthetic
Me: Awesome, exactly what i wanted to know. Thank you very much!!

Gemipedia Article: Ordered Dithering

Other dithering methods

Oppen (the dev of ariane) suggest this method

Oppen: >here's a good ImageMagick command to create tiny image sizes:
convert -auto-orient a.jpg \
-resize 400 \
-colorspace gray \
-posterize 24 +dither \
-quality 70 \
-strip out.jpg