07.03.22
Posted in Protocol, Standard at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum ace0bf161d61d4a68229d414bdb27b0d
The Decline of the Web
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Web, which is over 30 years old, peaked quite a few years ago; it’s increasingly just a conduit of traffic unrelated to actual pages (articles, blogs) and just a vehicle for “apps”, which are in turn centralised or closely guarded by few companies and very few governments (public communication is not their goal, manipulation and social control are the principal objectives)
INTERNET protocols are a lot more than the World Wide Web (not everyone uses “Webmail” and many still use IRC). For exchange of pages/articles more and more people turn to alternative protocols, one of which is Gemini.
How does relative growth stack up? Consider it visually:
The Web in decline. More in the video above, based on Netcraft’s Web Server Survey.
Gemini capsules count as of July 3rd, 2022. Based on Lupa’s data and charted by Botond.
The images above show how the Web stopped growing, whereas Gemini continues to grow. In our Daily Links we increasingly post Gemini links because news articles on the Web have become scarcer. This is affirmed by the latest news [1,2] (links at the bottom from today's Daily Links). We moved or extended ourselves into Gemini almost 1.5 years ago because we don’t envision a bright future for the Web. It’s a source of misinformation (for “engagement” or “monetisation”), it’s increasingly just “webapps” (not actual pages), it’s bloated, and definitely a growing security liability (too much proprietary code executed — without explicit authorisation! — on the client side/machine).
In terms of content, the Web has less to offer these days than it did a decade ago. Social control media is worse than worthless [1, 2]. As an associate explains, “many of the “local” papers in the US are shells held by a national company specializing not in gathering local news but in pumping out an agenda into the local market instead [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. News deserts are a thing in the US.” █
____________
-
Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.
Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.
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Nevertheless, the current economic downturn isn’t the only factor to blame for the recent flurry of layoffs in the media industry. Just a week ago, streaming giant Netflix laid off 3% of its workforce, or about 300 employees, in its second round of layoffs following its disastrous first-quarter results. But Netflix’s woes have little to do with the broader macroeconomic picture and more to do with the streaming landscape and management’s shortcomings.
Big media mergers and acquisitions have also resulted in layoffs associated with restructuring and rebalancing. Earlier this week, it was reported that CAA and ICM’s merger would result in roughly 105 layoffs. And around 1,000 employees at Warner Bros. Discovery are also getting axed, according to reports. At the time of the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, management said it would be looking to create $3 billion in cost savings. Though layoffs are always difficult, post-M&A layoffs are often par for the course.
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06.27.22
Posted in Protocol, Standard at 9:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Web at 30+ is not what it was back in the 1990s; many people nowadays use tabs because ‘pages’ take far too long to load (in spite of tremendous bandwidth gains; part of the problem is RAM hoard and CPU hogs) and the original goal, a platform or a protocol for interconnected pages, has long been abandoned
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Posted in Protocol, Site News, Standard at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Spacewalk is one hub of many in the fast-growing Geminispace, which is estimated to have over 2,500 capsules and many daily updates
Summary: Gemini links have become abundant enough that they justify having their own section in Daily Links instead of scattered around and blended with World Wide Web links
THE coming week will be mostly devoted to EPO news because EPO affairs are very important and it’s a critical time (hopefully António Campinos will be tentatively ousted).
But that does not mean we slow down with Daily Links and site improvement. This past week we made slight improvements to the Gemini capsule as well. The next batch of Daily Links has a whole section partitioned aside and reserved for Gopher/Gemini links. The template associated with the change has just been pushed to Git and will likely be subjected to further tweaks over the next few days.
“Gemini is nowhere near perfect; but it does just about enough for most use cases.”The Web is quickly moving in a direction we do not like. There’s not much journalism left in it, it’s overrun by spam, it’s far too bloated, and few companies control or spy on the lion’s share of Web activity.
We’re not leaving the Web, but we’re setting one foot in the smaller lifeboat just in case the Web goes under. One day it will. Nothing lasts forever. The Web is no longer a platform or a protocol for Web pages but for programs or “webapps”. We don’t want that. We don’t need that. We already got rid of Adobe Trash (Flash), but Google et al recreate it algorithmically — mostly in Chromium — and then “standardise” what they implemented (rammed down our throats through W3C). Shades of Microsoft OOXML and ISO… sans the bribes and overt corruption.
Suffice to say, this has severe ramifications for security, the environment (many facets to how it ruins the planet, ranging from new device production/manufacturing to usage, delivery, and computation), and fairness/neutrality. The Web fosters monopolies; it has become increasingly centralised, as some documentaries warned over a decade ago. We too have cautioned about it and in 2020 we took action.
Gemini is nowhere near perfect; but it does just about enough for most use cases. █
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06.20.22
Posted in Standard at 8:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The founder says “it’s easy to overstate just how bad things are. Despite the loss of the mailing list, despite the glacial pace of refinements to the protocol specification, statistics provided by the Lupa crawler suggest that since the FAQ was last updated a little over a year ago, the number of Gemini capsules has more than doubled, so too has the number of unique domains hosting Gemini content, and the number of unique IP addresses didn’t quite double but got close.”
Summary: The World Wide Web was preceded by several similar hypertext systems, some of which technically superior to it; now that the world’s Bloated Web (formerly World Wide Web) gravitates towards proprietary browsers and is basically becoming like Adobe’s Flash it makes more sense to embrace Gemini for textual material that’s safe to access
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06.16.22
Posted in Standard at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Thousands of active capsules still produce thousands of stories
Summary: Gemini Protocol and Gemini Space (or Geminispace) continue to expand; we’ve gathered some data since the start of May and are charting it below (new content enumerated, aggregated)
wc -l *
31 2022-05-05.gmi
19 2022-05-06.gmi
267 2022-05-07.gmi
19 2022-05-08.gmi
22 2022-05-09.gmi
32 2022-05-10.gmi
31 2022-05-11.gmi
27 2022-05-12.gmi
32 2022-05-13.gmi
22 2022-05-14.gmi
42 2022-05-15.gmi
130 2022-05-16.gmi
87 2022-05-17.gmi
48 2022-05-18.gmi
61 2022-05-19.gmi
43 2022-05-20.gmi
24 2022-05-21.gmi
41 2022-05-22.gmi
33 2022-05-23.gmi
48 2022-05-24.gmi
161 2022-05-25.gmi
41 2022-05-26.gmi
26 2022-05-27.gmi
23 2022-05-28.gmi
147 2022-05-29.gmi
30 2022-05-30.gmi
93 2022-05-31.gmi
39 2022-06-01.gmi
25 2022-06-02.gmi
84 2022-06-03.gmi
14 2022-06-04.gmi
148 2022-06-05.gmi
37 2022-06-06.gmi
36 2022-06-07.gmi
37 2022-06-08.gmi
22 2022-06-09.gmi
24 2022-06-10.gmi
92 2022-06-11.gmi
30 2022-06-12.gmi
48 2022-06-13.gmi
172 2022-06-14.gmi
43 2022-06-15.gmi
76 2022-06-16.gmi
Charted:
As ODF: Gemini planet stats
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06.13.22
Posted in Servers, Standard at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
| - |
Bloat |
Spying (a lack of privacy) |
Centralisation of lookup (DNS) |
Centralisation of “trust” (self-signed certificates rejected/discouraged) |
Abudance of misinformation, ads |
| World Wide Web |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
| Gemini |
✘ |
? |
✓ |
✘ |
✘ |
| Gopher |
✘ |
? |
✓ |
✘ |
✘ |
| IPFS |
✓ |
? |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
Summary: Internet protocols for exchange and transmission of pages compared; More ✓ means less desirable
____
✓ Bad attribute.
✘ Good attribute.
? While in theory it is possible for Gemini capsules to spy on visitors, the data is rarely passed on. With Gopher, spying is very much possible but rarely done. IPFS is hard to track due to the swarm-like nature of it.
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Posted in Servers, Site News, Standard at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Activity levels have not waned, either; last month we served half a million pages over gemini:// (all-time high)
Yes, Taz is in Gemini too!
Summary: Last December Lupa could identity 1,500 active domains (online capsules); now, in June, it’s 2,000; though we try not to write much about Gemini (as Gemini should be talking about more than just itself) the expansion carries on
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03.09.22
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Standard at 10:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 6a84c3a45403cd4467e8f79cf7fb51ae
Internet is Under Attack, Governments Say They Protect You
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: A lot of the Internet (connectivity over UDP/TCP) and stuff built on top of it seems to be rotting and/or ebbing away, not just in Russia and China (among other Internet villains/scapegoats, notorious for extensive censorship/blocking); This scope of sabotage and obstruction goes further and further, extending far beyond the corporate Web, so that necessitates a rapid change in online behaviour (failing that, offline fallbacks)
THE national news sites have been warped into government propaganda sites, corporate media is selling war, and Twitter profits from conflict.
Where are we heading?
“Our self-hosted IRC network is a lot better anyway.”Well, surely enough alternatives will be sought. I quit social control media (all of it) 5 days ago and so far I’m loving it. Our self-hosted IRC network is a lot better anyway. It’s very diverse in all sorts of ways and it allows rapid response (native software has better interfaces than Web interfaces), it’s quicker to type in it, and there’s no time delays for responses (rather than wait for notifications people speak almost in real time).
The video explains rather bizarre things we’ve seen on the Internet lately, especially US-based ISPs (blocking things that they really ought not block), and then reminds people that we’ve invested a lot of time and effort improving the Gemini capsule. It’s not that it’s robust to censorship, not inherently anyway, but it’s ‘off the radar’ for the most part. Sanctions, for example, don’t impact Gemini capsules. The same is true when it comes to IRC, especially with many networks coming online all the time. Setting up an IRC network is vastly simpler than running and maintaining social control media platforms.
“Principles of the cornerstones of the Net aren’t being tolerated anymore.”With rotting economies (the full effect of soaring corporate and residential energy prices — with their knock-on effect on travel, food etc. — is yet to be seen) and an unstable world at risk of nuclear confrontation the governments will likely resort to unprecedented measures. Adapting when things already escalate is adapting too late.
Self-hosting has never seemed so attractive. Third parties cannot be relied upon as many shut down (due to government, corporate, or financial pressures), the censorious tendencies aside. 2022 is going to be a very interesting year for the Internet because we’re seeing it stress-tested on many levels. Principles of the cornerstones of the Net aren’t being tolerated anymore. █
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