● 01.31.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

●● Geminispace is Good for Archiving, Too

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 3:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum a0988a9fe4c88d48f930093120b20e1cGemini Preserving the Past Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

http://techrights.org/videos/internet-history-in-gemini.webm

Summary: Some capsules strive to preserve knowledge/history and they do that at a ‘hyper’ scale, albeit using textual form with emphasis on simple, easily-compressible formats

THE way Geminispace typically works is, there’s a vast pool of files, just like in Gopher, but it is presented a lot more securely and nicely than in Gopher (there’s also Unicode support and basic structural ‘markup’).

So it’s hardly surprising that some capsules, such as this one which I demonstrate in the video above, have USENET archives and text files from the BBS days. No ads, no corporate spamming, just a stock of important messages from back in the days when the Internet felt more like a community and not a battleground for government-connected crackers.

“No ads, no corporate spamming, just a stock of important messages from back in the days when the Internet felt more like a community and not a battleground for government-connected crackers.”

Gemini has millions of pages in it. How many millions? It’s hard to measure. There are also object files like photos, with many being added this month and then shared. Gemini is becoming less of an ‘underdog’ and people tell me every day that they use it. Some set up their own capsules. Here’s an example from yesterday; its creator described it as the “first photo gallery,”, which can be found here (spoiler: some dogs and cats, but mostly nature). More photo galleries nowadays appear in Geminispace because the simplicity of GemText is very attractive. Lupa now enumerates 1,657 active capsule — a number that grows rapidly this month. Maybe by the end of the year this number will double or treble. █

“In those early years, individuals were free to express themselves on the Internet in any way they wished on any topic they wished without the slightest interference from corporations or governments. Mostly, individuals created the content and ran the platforms that hosted it–Internet-connected BBS’s and home computers. Internet users could go wherever they wanted and view whatever they wanted without being tracked or spied on. We had no corporate gatekeepers, no search engines, no SEO or click-bait, no obnoxious advertisements. The “social media” back then–IRC, USENET, BBS’s–had little in common with today’s social media. The NSA was not monitoring email. No laws punished black-hat hackers. Governments were not even aware of the problem. The Internet was not just unworthy of their attention. It was essentially invisible to them.”

–The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back

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