Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • not carried together

    I can't do this again
    sit here shattered 
    met with nothing but cold 
    the same pain
    

  • Dungeon Meshi/Undertale crossover

    I took lack of such crossover in my own hands and this is a result. I hope to write more soon, in meantime please leave as much criticism as you can. I hope to be mostly follow mechanics of both universes, so if I have forgot something or you simply disagree please write. Also, I haven't thought about title so if you have any ideas for it please write those too.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The era of nostalgia

      Last night at a music festival, during the set for Matchbox 20 Rob Thomas made a comment about how he started the band not thinking that one day their music would become nostalgia for a generation. One of the previous band's lead singers had made a comment about how MB20's album was the soundtrack for his parent's divorced. This is what triggered Rob's comment.

      It got me thinking about how no one really thinks about the things they make as being this long running part of the history of humanity. No one sets out creating music or making a movie or writing a book with the intent that it will span decades or centuries and become iconic. And yet so many actions turn out to be much more than their initial creation. In the past two years I've seen a bunch of bands from when I was a kid. Their songs were the background music of so many of our lives. But I never really thought about how they just wanted to make music. It just happened to be the right music at the right time.

    • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dark Web and Beyond

      Most people experience the internet through a surprisingly small number of doors. They open a familiar browser, enter a search term, and move between commercial websites, social networks, streaming platforms, online stores, and cloud services. Although this environment seems almost limitless, much of it is controlled by a relatively small number of corporations, hosting providers, advertising networks, application stores, and recommendation algorithms.

      Beyond this brightly illuminated commercial district lies a larger and stranger landscape.

      Some parts of it are old: IRC channels, Usenet newsgroups, Gopher servers, mailing lists, bulletin-board systems, and independently hosted forums. Some are deliberately minimalist, such as Gemini. Others are federated systems in which independently operated servers communicate through shared standards, including Matrix, XMPP, and ActivityPub. Still others are peer-to-peer networks, distributed storage systems, experimental mesh networks, or anonymity overlays such as I2P, Tor, Yggdrasil, GNUnet, IPFS, Hyphanet, Nostr, Secure Scuttlebutt, and Hypercore.

      These systems should not all be called “the dark web.” That expression usually refers to services intentionally hidden inside special overlay networks, particularly Tor onion services and sites within I2P. Gemini, IRC, Matrix, Gopher, XMPP, and the Fediverse are alternative forms of online communication, but they are not automatically secret or anonymous.