Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 04/05/2023: IKEA Maze and Lawsuits Over Negative Reviews



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • A Ducky Couple and the Unexpected Sunset 2023-05-04 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

        Yesterday, I caught this devoted pair enjoying a leisurely swim during the noon hour...

      • An off-ramp from the digital IKEA maze [2023-05-04]

        There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she's crazy. That's basically what the last decade of the Internet[1]. It feels like it's shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.

        In part I think it's the fault of the big walled gardens on the web, whether Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. They're essentially designed like a maze. They make you feel like there are no other websites aside from few silos and e-commerce and various forms of blog spam and political propaganda, like the web only consists of maybe a few dozen big sites, encircled by an endless digital strip mall.

    • Technical

      • Lawsuits Over Negative Reviews

        I hate how businesses now can sue a person over a negative review or at least threaten to do so. They even shame a person for it to defend their reputation with responses such as:

        "... I have seen that you slander a lot of businesses in Google review..."

        Chances are they won't sue me. The only reason I've removed the revies is because I do not want to be shamed.

        I have a right to a good reputation, too. So what if I am not a business. I'm still a human being. This causes me to believe that I should criticize businesses anonymousloy by writing my opinion in chalk on the sidewalk or something.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • My Gemini Crawlers Meta Info Page

          I have the (bad?) habit of diving into my server log files every once in a while to know what’s going on. This is not needed for a purely static site like mine. I know that I will see robots crawling my sites at will, but at least I'd like to know which ones and how.

          After scouring the documenation of different Geminispace crawlers, I tried to piece together information about used IPs and more. Because the amount of information released differs, I created an overview page with all the available info and added some additional info, which I, as a user and server maintainer alike, would like to know about those crawlers.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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