Video download link | md5sum 91e5dd7b28afd3b9e30871aaa1439a54 Gemini Saves Old/Low-End Computers Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Some of the lessons we've learned this past year and the status quo in Gemini Space, which lowers the entry barriers for authors online (GemText is far easier and more approachable than HTML) and encourages self-hosting, self-signing etc.

Gemini Space (or Geminispace as one conjoined word; some people abbreviate it like that) grows faster than ever, which is good for the environment and good for the minds (it helps tackle "addictive" aspects that were integrated into the Web to usher in more surveillance, manipulation etc.) among several other things...

Gemini Space isn't difficult to host from one's home, even over slow residential connections. GemText is very light and simple as it does not encourage the use of images, which can eat up a lot of bandwidth unnecessarily (even for objects that are never viewed by the visitor).

In terms of security/privacy, Geminispace is very good. Not perfect, but definitely good enough. Some people still use the deprecated TLS 1.2, so yesterday we loosened our restrictions -- though only after we had tightened them a few weeks ago -- allowing (once again) people with outdated Gemini clients to access our capsule. As the graph on the right hand side shows, sooner or later, or maybe within a couple of years, almost nobody will use TLS 1.2 anymore.

The video above covers some of the latest developments in Geminispace and in our own capsule, including ways to tackle spiders among other bots. There are search engines, research-centric indexers, and all sorts of things one inevitably has to deal with after setting up a new capsule.

The sad thing is that the Web has become not a platform for shopping but a battleground of misinformation, anxiety, and exploitation. More and more people recognise the negative impacts of what became of the Web, gaming people's emotions for corporate gains and mental abuse, including gaslighting, indoctrination, and incitement. Putting aside technical perils like DRM, bloat, and "modern" aspects that leave blind people in the dark (there are other accessibility-related perils)

"Much more can be said about the issues that Web users face and we hope that the FSF and GNU will one day join Geminispace."The Web wasn't always like that. Social control media didn't always provoke for "engagement", Google News (Gulag News/Noise) did not always push spam, lies, and plagiarism, videos online weren't always censored for the slightest of "offence" (like using one supposedly 'bad word'), and it was never as centralised as it is today.

Much more can be said about the issues that Web users face and we hope that the FSF and GNU will one day join Geminispace. It would do a lot towards legitimising it and bringing new users to it. A year ago (in February and March) the FSF's Alex Oliva spoke about this and this morning I spoke to RMS about it. Geminispace has quadrupled in size since I first spoke to them about it and judging by the growth (e.g. total number of capsules) so far this year we can expect it to more than double in 2022, having nearly quadrupled last year. ⬆