● 08.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 07/08/2023: Working With Elpher

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Recently, Seba wondered about xp-for-gold and considered xp-per-session instead. My take is this: As a player, I do like the feeling of having achieved a difficult thing. Ideally, if the game has advancement, then advancement should be something that’s difficult, unlike sitting at the table, which is just the bare minimum. So if you want to avoid the mini-game of *read-the-referee’s-mind* then you need to setup up achievements ahead of time.

Politics and World Events

• There is a myth that propaganda is not used or needed in a democratic society. Well, if you still live in one of those, look around in the media. As Jacques Ellul explains (1962, still valid), there is a need for propaganda both by the state and the individual. The participation of the masses in politics makes propaganda necessary; because the government cannot follow the opinion, the opinion will have to follow the government. And thus the need to sway opinions. Ellul’s radical claim is that if propaganda succeeds, it happens because there is a need for it in the individual subjected to it. Indeed, there is a psychological need for belonging, that is, to agree with your fellow citizens on basic issues. Another reason is the need for simplification and clarity. Pure information, or something approaching it, might be found by reading the press releases of a few complementary news agencies. Or imagine wading through the enormous information dumps Wikileaks used to deliver as your source of news. It is too much to make sense of, too much to take in for a normal person. Following a single story also would require exceptional memory, as news about it drops once in a while interspersed with much else. Thus there is a real need for editorialised news digests, but those cannot be as neutral as the sources. More important, though, is the individual’s need for certitudes and confirmation of world views.

Technology and Free Software

• I like Emacs quite a lot. There’s something about the “everything app” (the real one, Elon) that can be quite liberating. However, Emacs has quite a steep learning curve. This, combined with the insistence on “self-documentation” can make using the software quite a challenge, particularly for those of us that don’t work in elisp all that much.

• Recently I took some time to sit down and… read some code. And some changelogs. All in the pursuit of a simple goal: making Elpher work with client certificates.

• Elpher does support client certificates and has a really nice workflow for adding new ones. It also supports associating these certificates with specific sites so you don’t need to be prompted. Sounds fantastic, but this second feature isn’t very well documented nor is it particularly obvious. Really, it needs to be documented with an example.

• Since I’ve worked this out and am a professional technical writer, I figured I’d give a short and sweet overview of the process of setting up the elpher-certificate-map.

Internet/Gemini

• I don’t know if anyone is interested in this, but let’s give it a try. It started as a thought experiment, when I looked for ‘lighter’ protocols I can implement on the Pico W. I see Spartan mentioned here and there, and I wonder if there’s any interest in going even more … spartan

• Federation is the major thing to learn here. From the start a new instance will be completely empty, and not just because nobody’s posted on it yet. The new instance doesn’t yet know about any other instances, and other instances don’t know about it.

• This changes as soon as any user on the new instance starts creating a network by following or getting followed by other users. Once your instance learns about other users on other instances, those users will start showing up in places like your instance’s federated feed.

• This leads to a chicken and egg problem if you’re a new user on a low population instance. You’ll be looking for people to follow but you’ll only be able to see users that your instance knows about, which might not be very many.

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