Techrights

Gemini Links 22/11/2025: Creeping Threats of IBM/Microsoft systemd and Geminaut Age Survey Results

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 22, 2025

Links 22/11/2025: Roblox Rolls Out Face Scans for Age Verification, Social Control Media Misused as Political Weapon Against EU and Others

The "Mafia"

HTTPS image: Forgotten shoes

GNOME bluefish

Gemini* and GopherPersonal/OpinionsTechnology and Free SoftwareInternet/GeminiProgramming

HTTPS: Gemini* and Gopher

* ### Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

🖼️ xkcd — Geologic Core Sample #3171

↺ 🖼️ xkcd — Geologic Core Sample #3171

Amazing What a Lick of Paint Can Do

↺ Amazing What a Lick of Paint Can Do

We've lived in this house ten years now - built it - and things have been slowly needing to be done. You build a house and you quickly realize that nothing's going to be perfect, that you're going to be dealing with things, in some capacity, regularly. That's part of the deal of homeownership, what you offer in exchange for not dealing with landlords, with shitty neighbours across the wall.We've largely been lucky. Nothing terrifying. The usual nail pops, a cabinet that wasn't anchored properly and started to lean forward, and the most serious, water penetration issues four years in, the combination of mistakes made during the build, and bad landscaping, and general settling. All that dealt with. Since then, it's basically been fine. Except, the interior paint. It's always cracked easily. We assumed it was maybe cheap paint. This year we started getting a bunch of paint peeling on the ceiling in one of the bathrooms, and noticing some cosmetic cracks elsewhere. I didn't feel like dealing with the stress of doing it all myself. A couple months ago, I hired someone. Their schedule being what it was, they weren't able to get in till yesterday. But they did great work. The bathroom peeling, they said, might've been due to painting directly over the drywall without priming. Wouldn't surprise me.

🔤SpellBinding — FUNOPSL Wordo: DUSTY

↺ 🔤SpellBinding — FUNOPSL Wordo: DUSTY

Technology and Free Software

More scary thoughts on the future of open source desktops

↺ GOPHER: More scary thoughts on the future of open source desktops

In my last years phlog "Scary thoughts on the future of the open source desktop" [1] I explained that the domination of Linux in the open source world constitutes a growing risk.Today I read Joe Brockmeier's post [3], in which he points to the blog post that Adrian Vovk -a GNOME contributor and member of its release team- wrote last summer. This blog post is titled "Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd" [2].

Internet/Gemini

Geminaut Age Survey Results

↺ Geminaut Age Survey Results

Recently, there was a poll on BBS about the approximate age of Geminauts. The poll has been open for about three weeks, with 104 responses so far, making this likely the most comprehensive survey of Gemini demographics to date.First, what do these 104 people represent? Obviously, there is self-selection bias here as all the respondents are active users of bbs.geminispace.org. Looking at the overall capsule activity, BBS has about a hundred people posting and/or commenting per month, so we can say that most of the people currently active on BBS have now responded. This makes the results well-representative of this particular capsule. What about the wider Geminispace, though? The survey excludes anyone who just writes gemlogs or occasionally reads posts on Antenna, i.e., "passive" users. Large hubs like Midnight/Smol Pub, Flounder, and SDF are not necessarily represented at all. I don't think there is any way to accurately estimate the overall ratio of active vs. passive users, but typically online you get about an order of magnitude more passive users compared to active ones. Gemini might be somewhat different given the small size of the community and the builder/explorer mentality. After all, one gets more out of Gemini when actively participating and not just sitting back and lurking.Other multi-user capsules do not publish active user statistics, but the number of total users is around 2000 on Station and 2500 on Astrobotany, which is roughly comparable to BBS (1500). It is plausible to assume that these other large capsules see active users in the low hundreds, too. For example, there are 240 live plants on Astrobotany, which suggests around 200 active users watering them. This gives us further leeway in viewing this survey as representing a meaningful subset of the overall Geminaut population.