Repeating the Web's Mistakes (was gemini+submit:// (was Re: Uploading Gemini content))

[Matthew Graybosch]

On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 20:56:35 +0000
solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

> I *do* like the idea of naming it titan://...

Thanks. I honestly just couldn't resist.

> 5. ...I'm wary that facilitating "user friendly" Gemini hosts which
> anybody can post to using a client carries a very real risk of
> fostering a culture of dependency where people don't know how to do
> anything not offered as a feature by their provider, who has the
> ability to change, remove, or charge for those featurs, and also of
> pushing us toward a more centralised Geminispace where large numbers
> of users congregate on a small number of servers which make
> themselves especially appealing to non-technical users.

> 6. Does anybody else feel like we are just instinctively
> re-implementing the familiar history of the web without much caution
> or critical thought?

That's been nagging at me as well. TBH, I'm not actually comfortable
with the seeming necessity of public hosts like tanelorn.city to get
people creating and publishing gemini content. I'm not used to asking
people to trust me like this, and I'm not comfortable with the power I
have over people using tanelorn.city.

Let's be honest; it shouldn't be that hard to run a gemini daemon out
of a personal computer in your own home, whether it's your main desktop
or just a raspberry pi. The protocol is light enough that CPU and
memory usage should be next to nothing compared to Firefox or Chrome. 

It probably wouldn't be that hard for a compentent Windows or OSX
developer to create a graphical app suitable for people who aren't
sysadmins that published an arbitrary directory and starts up again
whenever their PC or Mac reboots. The nature of the protocol all but
guarantees that.

I think the biggest problem, at least in the US, is that ISPs seem
hellbent on keeping residential internet users from using their
connections for anything but consumption. You've got to use a dynamic
DNS service like no-ip.com, and even if you manage that you might still
find yourself getting cut off over a TOS violation. People are
thoroughly conditioned toward using the internet as glorified cable TV,
and only expressing themselves on platforms they don't control.

Then there's DNS, domain names, ICAAN, etc. Maybe if we still used a
UUCP-style addressing scheme like
<country>.<province>.<city>.<neighborhood>.<hostname> it wouldn't
matter what I called my host as long as the hostname was unique to the
<neighborhood>. But instead we settled on <domain-name>.<tld>, which
needs to be administered by registrars to ensure uniqueness, and domain
registration is yet more sysadmin stuff that most people don't
necessarily have the time, skill, or inclination to deal with.

I would prefer that public hosts weren't necessary. I think that
everybody who wants to should be able to publish from their own device
without having to become a sysadmin. As long as operating a gemini
service remains the province of sysadmins, we're going to maintain the
division between haves (sysadmins) and have nots (people who can't or
don't want to sysadmin) that prevented the web from becoming (or
remaining) a democratic platform.

This became something of a political rant, and I probably should have
put it on demifiend.org instead. Sorry if this doesn't belong here; I'm
posting this under a new subject so that it starts a new thread instead
of derailing the existing one.

-- 
Matthew Graybosch		gemini://starbreaker.org
#include <disclaimer.h>		gemini://demifiend.org
https://matthewgraybosch.com	gemini://tanelorn.city
"Out of order?! Even in the future nothing works."