In Germany, we used to put an ASCII art fish for trolls, because they were troll-fishing:

><xX))))o>

That was advising others not to react to them/ Maybe we should use something similar for clanker-bots ?

Ahrtal, Acapulco, Derna, Emiglia Romana, Valencia, Blatten in Switzerland… every year we see more apocalyptic images.

Taiwan does this differently, and it works better:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/thedetail/578364/how-taiwan-is-leading-the-way-in-the-fight-against-disinformation

https://en.tfc-taiwan.org.tw/disinformation/

https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/how-taiwan-has-reduced-social-polarisation-and-become-more-resilient-disinformation

The problem is that these social media sites have UIs that are addictive by design, and full of dark patterns. Putting that UI onto another domain name, owned by another company or organization, does not solve this problem. Replacing X with Mastodon does not solve that, even when the people running Mastodon have good intentions.

And “Addictive by Design” does real damage.

We need to think a bit sharper to get out of that hole we have dug ourself in.

I am always wondering why there is no standard for video conferencing?

We can be glad that the telephone was not invented in our times…

Oh, I see I made an error here:

The page I cited gives the power consumption in Ampere, it is 0.360 Ampere.

This is not, and this is what I overlooked, equal to the power consumption in Watt.

What applies here is the formula

 P = I * U

where I is current in Ampere, U is Voltage, and P is Power in Watt. And while I is 0.36 Ampere, U is 5.1 Volt (see www.raspberrypi.com/products/power-supply) , so the real power consumption is

1.85 Watt (instead of “half a Watt”).

The 5 A charger can deliver 25.5 Watt.

Here is the python code I used to compute the above table:

 >>> def fall_height_from_fall_speed_kms(v):
 ...   v_ms=v/3.6
 ...   a = 9.81 # m / s **2
 ...   t = v_ms / a
 ...   h = t ** 2 * a / 2
 ...   return h

In principle, this is correct. But the need for a helmet increases massively with speed.

Consider the end speed of free fall when falling a certain height - or the inverse, height in meters versus speed in kilometer per hour. It is:

10 km/h   ..... 0.39 meter
20 km/h   ..... 1.57 meter
30 km/h   ..... 3.54 meter
40 km/h   ..... 6.29 meter
50 km/h   ..... 9.83 meter

Would you jump from ten meters height into a concrete surface? Few people would, because it is almost certain that you die. But the frame pillar of a car is equally hard as such a surface.

Another data point: In the center of Copenhagen, not so many people use a helmet, but the speed is typically between 10 and 15 km/h - so many bikes there ! - and the number of serious accidents is very low. The contrary is the case for Germany.

And just to make a point: Using a helmet is always safer.

Yes, right.

But: A bike helmet won’t help you much if you have a collision at 50 km/h. If you go at moped / light motorcycle speed, you need a motorcycle helmet, too.

That was sadly exactly what I was expecting from the electric motorization of bicycles. It is a history that has repeated itself many times in the last 70 or 80 years since the first combustion engine mopeds.

The fact is that the human-powered bike is at a sweet spot of efficiency and safety. Once you go faster, you need a helmet, a heavier frame, wider tyres, better brakes, wider lanes, protective clothing, protection against cold, a heavier motor for propelling all the extra weight, and so on. The energy input from you the human dwindles.

It is not any more a bicycle.

Gemini is more like personal web sites and blogs - with very little setup effort, almost no maintenance, and light on both extra features and resource use.

It is calmer and a different style of writing and reading. More deliberate if you want so. Pages read like an eBook.

Also, open source Internet technologies are not exclusive. It is not either/either. There is no need to view everything as competition. Especially since Gemini is tiny compared with popular social media sites like Reddit. Gemini might have ten thousand active users - but high-quality content. It attracts a certain frugal breed of people.

Also, one can learn by looking at and trying other things, and see things one is used to with new eyes.

Here one idea what can possibly be done better (adressing an addictive element of Mastodon, the “endless feed”, which it has inherited from Twitter I guess):

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/tilde.town/~dzwdz/b/feeds.gmi

Rightwing policies in an expensive suit.

This does not bode well.

Effectively, they are working toward the AfD Nazi-Far Right taking the power. As why they do that? I have no answer.

What is wrong with the fediverse?

Nothing, because it has a different purpose?

Thanks!

This is a young (and still small) project of open source programmers and a user community which believe that for some purposes, a lot of useless and annoying features and bloat can be omitted from the “Modern Web” - and the result can still be much more user-friendly and useful for open discussion and exchange of ideas than what we have today with Facebook and X.

The design comes from the belief that a more frugal use of resources is better, if focused on what is the real core goal - transporting text, ideas, and media over the network.

Turns out it works nicely for some people!

It is also less addictive than social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit with endless feed and “like” buttons.

(Edit)

So, what is it useful for?

• Microblogs
• keeping in touch with friends
• Personal Blogs and long form texts
• sharing ideas
• political discussion, for example ecological questions
• Sharing poetry, photos, images, music, art, other media, data and documents
• organizing and sharing file data
• sharing source code like tar archives and zipped version control repositories

What is this not useful for?

• interactive web content like e.g. shopping sites or online banking
• forums
• marketing material
• AI slop
• user tracking
• surveillance

(as you see, it is not claimed to be good for everything, and you can also expect some weird argumentation and trolling in discussions around it!)

See also discussion in the Linux channel:

https://feddit.org/post/24780758

You seem to assume that intelligent humans are only capable of posting stuff on Xitter and Facebook.

Writing text in Gemini format is simpler than Markdown, which is what people are using here.

Reading Gemini context only requires a client, for example an Android app like Rosy Crow, or using a Web gateway, like https://gemini.tildeverse.org/ , or https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/ .

Publishing a Gemini blog requires at the minimum only to get an account at a pubnix server (such as the tildeverse servers above).

If one wants to self-host it, one needs only to set up a Rasberry Pi running the server program. The complexity is about the same as running a file sharing client.

Yet some people want to frame it as if the only way to participate in the Internet is to use Facebook and Twitter.

accessible technologies

In respect to accessibility, the fact that Gemini focuses on actual text content makes it far easier to use accessibility tools like screen readers and Braille displays.

In fact, what is a real advantage is that there are also Genini clients which display in the terminal, and you can adjust the font size as you actually need. Myself I used that a lot when I had bad eye problems a while ago.

A typical web page today transmits many Megabytes of data for at most a few kilobytes of real information. And much if that data is unnecessary JavaScript code which executes on the client, costing bandwith and power - for the sole purpose of ads and tracking.

GenAI-geberated pseudoinformation uses even more power.

Gemini omits all that. That’s why it is lightning fast (and far more comfortable to read, like an eBook).

To your argument that the Internet and the WWW are decentralized:

On the level of the TCP/IP protocol, it is decentralized in the sense it can route around failures (it was designed to survive a nuclear attack).

(As an aside, the routing protocols, specifically BGP, can however be manipulated - that happened during the attack on Venezuela. It can also be blocked, see Iran - throwing a black veil on many people’s death.)

But in respect to how the modern web of HTML/HTTP is set up and used, it is not decentralized at all:

• Every street food shop seems to need a FaceBook page
• Individuals communicate mainly over WhatsApp
• Teens use mainly Instagram and TicToc
• Community-Owned web forums have almost disappeared, most moved to Facebook, and personal blogs are dying out
• most private web sites use Google and Facebook tracking devices, like like buttons, tracking pixels, Google analytics, fingerprinting, and so on
• Sites like medium.com, originally meant for personal writing by people who put in time, are succumbing to commercialization and AI slop
• The only open source browser code base, Firefox, has sunken to 2.2% market share. This means that Google can push things like DRM into Web standards which means the browser is running software which by principle is not controlled by the user, but by somebody else. This is very bad!
• ECommerce runs dominantly on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure
• Payments use dominantly PayPal

To sum up, without very few large and (in many senses of the word) power-hungry US companies, namely Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Paypal, Apple, the WWW and with it, a good part of the European ecobomy, would come to a standstill.

Put plainly, they can more or less switch Europe off if they want.

And we can’t even have political discussions on European matters without Google and Facebook tracking this.

Gemini is fine for:

• microblogs
• personal blogs
• sharing photos the simple way
• journals
• news, see gemini://taz.de/
• thoughtful political discussion (via interconnected blogs)
• long form texts which benefit from a distraction-free reading experience
• simple wikis with many interconnected pages, for example software documentation
• hosting static media like photos, pictures, videos, documents
• sharing source code and zipped git repos from small open source projects

What it doesn’t serve is the so-called attention economy.