073a3c6bcc8d795848b9133fac5d3e8d
6 Months of Gemini Uptime
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
THIS month has started very strongly for us. In HTTP/S we're looking at 5.5 hits/second, on average, and in Gemini about 25,000 page requests per day. One noteworthy milestone is that for the first time (ever) our Gemini server, agate, exceeded 6 months in uptime (today it's exactly 6 months) and some time this month or next month we expect to have 50,000 pages in Gemini.
"In many ways, the Web controls users, the users do not control the Web. Or the real users are advertisers, spies etc."As a side note or addendum to the above video, I presented this IPFS index page exactly when the list was being refreshed (around 4AM every night) and that alone is the reason it was incomplete. There are many reasons to prefer for our readers to use Gemini, especially seeing the bad direction the World Wide Web has taken in recent years. It does not exist to serve users but to serve advertisers and today's Web browsers, not just Web sites, help companies control people. In many ways, the Web controls users, the users do not control the Web. Or the real users are advertisers, spies etc. There's no simple fix because very few companies control the Web and its future direction.
"Everything that makes the Web browser "better" is something that takes away from the Web platform something that the Web browser allowed it to do to begin with," Ryan notes in IRC this morning. "Ad blockers, JavaScript blockers, Brave putting in "random garbage" in an API readout so the site can't follow you around everywhere. Overriding cookie and local storage handling..."
"In the 90s, they called it the "World Wide Wait", because it was over a phone line and you had to wait minutes sometimes for a site to load. And now it's because you go to read the news and they want to pull in 600 MB of data, and part of that is a video you didn't want to see. Pretty much the only thing you can do with the Web is turn a bunch of crap off and use it in a partially-working state. Otherwise there's just going to be too much junk loading."
"Gemini pods [sic] aren't like Web sites because they don't have a way to FORCE the user to do anything, even load an image if they don't want to. This Fediverse thing is sort of a lie. Because ideally there wouldn't be a way to run a server for tons of users. Every user would be in a Peer-to-Peer system. There would be no way to block a user at a server level, only on a user-to-user basis. Then it would be up to the users to decide who they want to see. The Fediverse is federated between clusters of users on someone else's server. So it's like "FEDRA Colonies" from The Last of Us. Maybe it would be humorous to call it the FEDRAverse. Small groups of people living under the control of a local tyranny. In the game/TV show, pockets of the former United States government, forcing starving people to "earn their keep" incinerating plague victims and digging latrines.
"The Fediverse lie is that because it's a lot of tyrants in control of a small cluster, that's better somehow than one great big tyrant running Twitter. You run into more interesting stuff on Mastodon by looking at the public list of servers that the administrator decided to ban. A lot of times they don't even give a reason. It's just that nobody using his server can see that other server because the administrator didn't like it and won't tell you why." ⬆