01.28.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Gemini Gone Mainstream: German Media Now in Geminispace
Video download link | md5sum 4347900dbc61ae7ef20aae085f030ac6
Gemini Gone Mainstream
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: With the likes of TAZ embracing Geminispace/Gemini Protocol we seem to have reached some sort of inflection point; taz.de did in fact add official presence to Geminispace
THE number of Gemini users is growing rapidly and thus there’s demand for material. There are some gateways and portals that provide unofficial access to more mainstream sites (I spent an hour last night researching those), as well as tools one can leverage for this purpose. One such capsule is SimplyNews, but it has been down most of yesterday. Usually I watch it all day long for current news updates.
SimplyNews is like a gateway — it’s unofficial in the sense that it merely copies others’ articles and the administrator is concerned about heavy usage that can attract legal letters. As per this capsule which used to mirror DW (large German publisher): “I needed to pull the plug on this due to copyright concerns. If you want to install this software for private use, please ask me.”
It’s discussed in the video above. Did DW use copyright law to take down the capsule? Either way, my experience with German broadcasters hasn’t been positive; they send threatening legal letters even when Fair Use is a reasonable defence (e.g. translation of their programme, which defended EPO staff from EPO crimes; incidentally, EPO staff in Munich has just had an online meeting). Anyway, this capsule — just like SimplyNews — is not an official copy maintained by the original publishers. But official copies do exist in Geminispace and they now include TAZ. I had to check once or twice to convince myself that what I was seeing was a real thing! Yes, TAZ is now officially in Geminispace. That’s amazing. Moreover, new capsules are found at a relatively high rate; Lupa now counts “2013 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1640 of them.”
That’s like 40 new ones in just one week. And there’s lots more on the way that I know about.
The video above complains about the Web based on two aspects; one is bloat/surveillance/other technical issues and the second is misinformation, sometimes even outright spam, fake news (disinformation) and basically a poor state of “content” (Gulag News contributes to this by amplifying plagiarism sites and spamfarms). No search engine can compensate for those two things.
As an example, I give this latest IBM/Red Hat misinformation (see editorial comment at the top) and Phoronix resorting to clickbait. It’s a case of shooting one’s own foot, thinking it would somehow be compensated for, e.g. with gifts/ad impressions. In the long ruin this is suicide, as we’ve seen time and time again (other sites). If Phoronix becomes synonymous with Intel/ClearLinux/Microsoft/GitHub “content” (like this new example of WSL) and if people who visit Phoronix are greeted by news that they hate, they won’t be coming back. Over the past couple of days Phoronix helped the “Microsoft is Linux” messaging. Larabel should know better than this, but he went along with “Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution Adds Intel SGX Support, Updated Packages“ and “Microsoft’s Direct3D 12 Code For Mesa Now Supports OpenGL Tessellation Functionality“ (as usual, the comments are a lot more illuminating than these posts). One person has said: “I tried their shiny new Windows Terminal and it seems like an app executing on top of PowerShell, and because PowerShell itself is sluggish so did the Windows Terminal. It doesn’t have a right-click menu (at least by default), which is weird. Overall I like Linux terminals a lot better.”
Why even promote this in Phoronix? Larabel is helping the Trojan horse tactics. Assimilation tactics. Messier code, but Microsoft likes it. Microsoft is promoting this mess… because of “more options”. At what cost? “It’s too bad we have graphics API fragmentation,” one person wrote there. Linux (graphics code) developers have complained about this fragmentation and cautioned against letting Microsoft pollute projects like Mesa. Mesa isn’t for Windows. Of course this is an attack on Linux in disguise… WSL (whether you add a “g” or “2″ to it) is just an attack on GNU/Linux. They did the same to Java.
As Pydroid put it yesterday in IRC, “is this how a lot of free software ended up with a win32 directory?”
Anyway, Geminispace doesn’t attract this sort of corporate boot-licking/shilling. For the time being it is very modest and clean. We don’t rely on corporate cash for infrastructure (hence the hardware crash affecting the mailing list), but that’s a plus, not a minus. Congrats to Solderpunk et al. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
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