💾 Archived View for leetaur.com › gemlog › entries › 2024-03-11.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:03:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I recently saw a post (all links below) of someone who said he was quitting Gemini, due to its liberal bias. I wanted to weigh in a bit, because I've seen this argument before, that Gemini is liberal, and people cannot be heard due to censorship.
Antenna has banned a few people with strong conservative or non-mainstream ideas. I don't know that DSN Antenna (different capsule) has banned anyone, but it says on the front of the capsule that "Operator of DSN Antenna may remove any post or ban any domain at their own discretion."
To be included on both these aggregators, you send a "transmission" of where your atom or rss file is, the aggregators will scan the feed for recent posts, and include them in the list of posts on the capsule.
My view on these aggregator capsules censoring other people is that these capsules are run by private individuals, people with value systems, and they have the right to ban those they disagree with. It is their capsule.
Lets say I ran a capsule that aggregated Catholic content, and assume I'm using the same aggregation technique, or even the same code-base. If someone constantly sent transmissions that were angry and hostile to Catholicism, I would reserve and exercise the right to ban that capsule's transmissions as well. After all, it is my capsule, and my aggregator.
Complain about the censorship of individual aggregators if you want. I don't believe that the solution to censorship is to quit Gemini. Who made the currently dominant aggregators the definition of Gemini content anyways?
There are several thoughts on solutions to the censorship.
When I started using the web in 1995, I remember seeing Yahoo as the main search engine, but there were others. But search engines weren't the "definition" of the web either. Someone in college told me about Geocities, and my girlfriend (now wife) and I created our own pages on it. We then told our friends and family that we created the pages, and that if they wanted to they could visit them. Note very few of my friends and family were on the internet at that point.
Gemini is small, kind of like the web in 1995. You can share your content with each other just by telling people it is out there. No search engine, no aggregator needed. On this gemlog, I send the transmissions to Antenna when I post, but that is just to share my work if people might be interested. I don't know if anyone visits my capsule from Antenna (Gemini is often quiet that way).
For my friends and family, who don't have their own capsules and don't check Antenna or Capcom or any other Aggregators, I just send them an email and say "check this out". You can also create gemrings on your capsule, or check the gemrings on the capsules you like, and add their feeds to your Gemini browser (Amfora, Lagrange, whatever), and read the new content as it comes in.
This operates very similarly to my experience of the early web.
Gemini isn't the aggregators. Don't let an aggregator be the definiton of Gemini for you.
Gemini is the content. And, thank goodness, the content is not from corporations, but individuals, one of the main reasons I love Gemini.
A lot of people are used to X-Style feeds, or FB feeds, but it doesn't need to be that way. Gemini is not social media. It is a protocol.
Write your content, and share it with your friends and family. Encourage them to create content on Gemini as well. They could start with a hosting service, like Gemlog Blue. Or help them set up their own server.
You did it. You can help them to do it too.