💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1146 captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:29:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Many people say that Gemini is decentralized.
But it's not like that!
Yes, Gemini is handsome and graceful.
But after all, as in https, gemini is organized on the same technological principles.
And here you can also be banned for your thoughts and beliefs, and sometimes just because you are a citizen of some country.
I had such a case when my capsule was banned. Other than that, I'm not the only one.
In gemini, you also go on about the capitalists:
Would you like to glog for free? Welcome to some centralized blog services where you can get banned at any time for any reason.
Digging deeper, gemini suffers from the same problems as https.
I would love to see a p2p alternative to gemini, but none have been created yet.
Opinion?
I think that what you listed are wholly separate problems from https and gemini.
Both of those would work perfectly peer to peer if all servers and clients are in one network controlled by you. But since you have to exert a lot of effort to do that under IPv4 right now then it makes sense that you pay somebody to set the connection up for you.
Maybe some day IPv6 might remove the two latter points if I understand its implications correctly, but DNS is again just some ledger whose service you need to pay for, but you're fully free to just have an IP or set-up your own DNS even if that would be pointless since people seem to have agreed that it's just easiest to pay a handful of people to do that centrally.
Gemini and the web are both decentralized protocols, and it's silly to say they aren't. You don't have to be p2p distributed to be decentralized. Centralization for both happens at a higher level, when people make themselves dependent on certain sites; in particular, when they use social media platforms rather than (fungible) hosting platforms.
If you want to self-host without dealing with DNS, VPS, or static IP, run Gemini as a TOR hidden service. That'll even let you host your lolicon shit, if you're a filthy pedo. Just... don't expect anyone to link to your gemlog.
Most ISPs do not let you host services. Comcast called me and threatened to cut off my connection back in the day cause i just hosted all my own stuff. You can get away with it as long as you don't ever get even mildly popular. Toss a link into an irc and too many people click it and they'll call you that day. It happened to me, it can happen to you. Hence p2p services only exist as long as your isp allows it.
Background:
This guy was banned from srht.site after CSAM got posted to his capsule.
Hardly "at any time for any reason" or for being from some country or whatever.
Gemini isn't the darknet. Thankfully.
Not trying to be rude or anything, but where does it say that Gemini is decentralized? I must have missed that part. And really, the problem is that everyone has become so used to centralization that it's near impossible to get rid of it. I've seen attempts at p2p protocols but none have really taken off (or got shamed for having any relation to crypto)
To ~owleyarc:
In Russia, internet connection costs a penny. Unlike domains. But the point is not the price (although for a russian person to pay for a couple of bytes seems absurd), this is not such a problem. The problem is centralization itself. The DNS is controlled by corporations and the goverment.
To ~contrarian:
This is solved by banal encryption, at least in the Tor this is the only way everything works.
To ~skedaddle3644:
Blockchain is definitely not that. It is not made for this. If you are looking for an alternative to centralized networks, then you need to look towards IPFS and their libp2p library.
If you aren't posting alongside pedophiles, it isn't truly secure. It's the PPP rule when it comes to FOSS alternatives: are you a programmer, a paranoid person, or a pedophile?
I mean, if you're paying to have an internet connection, a domain name isn't exactly expensive. (Or you could even get one for free from some countries.) And if you have a domain name, you can easily self host without buying a static ISP from an internet provider.
~skedaddle3644 wrote (thread):
Wouldn't the problem be solved with some kind of blockchain? Maybe, one day, finally, in the distant future, we can have a use for the blockchain!