Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • FuriLabs FLX1: actually usable Linux phone

    I'm not new to Linux Phones. I was a backer of the original Librem 5 camping, own a Librem 5 devkit, later on a PinePhone. During FOSDEM I walked around and found the stand by FuriLabs where they demonstrated their FLX1 phone and chatted with all the participants. I knew about the phone because one of the people on a Discord server mentioned it (looking sus, btw) claiming great battery life and near perfect driver support. I chatted with FuriLab's CEO and engineers; they are smart and down to the ground. Better? The demo phones are awesome and actually works. And so I bought one of the phones at the stand and gave it a few test drives.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Should wikis block the UK?

      Of course, the answer is “no.” But when I read UK Users: Lobsters needs your help with the Online Safety Act I can’t help but think that maybe the answer should be “yes.”

    • A New Dawn

      During the past few years, I have been feeling quite "strange". Like the sensation that something was off.

      It was a while until I discovered what was bugging me so much.

      It turns out, I really hate what the "internet" has become:

      A shithole full of ads and nothing to see other than self-righteous influencers.

      This feeling and train of thought was clinically killing me, until I found it: the smallnet.

      A collection of human, real, and interesting posts.

      The smallnet is not just the "web".

      There is also another place, where a lot of people just like me, dump all their feelings and thoughts.

      Im talking about Gemini.

    • Bloody Google 😖

      It's funny how Google can install their AI thing on my phone without asking me, and keep telling me that my phone "has new features" that I don't want, but they can't manage to update the version of Android that it's running.

    • Hello Gemini

      I have heard of the gemini protocol over the years here and there but was never curious enough to find out what it was until last week.

      I installed a gemini browser (lagrange) and started reading and clicking on links.

      My first impression was that it didn't have much content. But after a while of reading and clicking through links, I soon found out about aggregators. Those aggregators really kept my attention because to my surprise I eventually found some gemlogs belonging to people I've heard of. For example Beej's Place which is from the creator of the excellent networking guides that I kept using as a reference in college.

    • On stagnation and burnout in the Gemini community

      This post is a bit of an unusual one for me. It's going into my gemlog only, without a corresponding Gopher version on my phlog. I might even take the unusual step of getting this post to show up on Antenna! The reason for all this is simply that this post is about and is for the Gemini community, so feels out of place in my phlog. I generally try to avoid, in this gemlog, getting too "meta" and talking about Gemini itself and I try not to wear my BDFL hat at all here, for a few reasons. I limit that stuff to the news posts at geminiprotocol.org, but that doesn't feel like the right venue for this one, either. This is not an "official take" on anything!

      So, there's been some talk in Geminispace lately of the community stagnating. People are seemingly bored, burnt out, lonely, dispirited. I don't really have a good sense of the scope of this feeling, to be honest. I don't have my finger on the pulse of the community at all (which I sometimes feel guilty about, but at the same time think is actually appropriate). I have my own personal CAPCOM instance which I check in on pretty much daily. Sometimes nothing shows up there for weeks at a time. Sometimes multiple new posts show up on the same day. Usually it's somewhere in between. Sometimes folk who haven't posted in what feels like a year, who I assume have left the space, return and prove me wrong. This has been my "normal" experience of the space for years now and I'm entirely comfortable with it, while acknowledging that many people may want, and be used to, more.