-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to bbs.geminispace.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini; charset=utf-8
I think you aren’t that familiar with the web. A LOT of content ends up lost because it never makes it into Archive.org and people respect the author’s wishes not to copy.
Entire domains of knowledge have basically vanished. Try to learn about the BBS scene in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. Almost everything is gone from the web and the people who remember it are dying off.
Chinese FidoNet knowledge is going the same way. It was the first text-based mass communication system in China and it’s gone. I’ve been collecting bits and pieces of what I can find to preserve in my capsule.
There is so much being lost and not being preserved at all. If you care about something: copy it.
May 09 · 4 weeks ago
@eriounious - oh WOW thank you so much! I had given up on finding it. It's a neat story. I liked it for the logic bits, and for the classical trivium references (in fact, it was a trivium search query that led me to your capsule...?). I didn't know anything about SCP, but got the chance to explore that site as well. Very interesting. Thanks again. :)
@eriounious - oh WOW thank you so much! I had given up on finding it. It's a neat story. I liked it for the logic bits, and for the classical trivium references (in fact, it was a trivium search query that led me to your capsule...?). I didn't know anything about SCP, but got the chance to explore that site as well. Very interesting. Thanks again. :)
@blah_blah_blah - well the feds didn't give it to me either, unless eriounious is a fed. I even asked all manner of GPT's to locate the story for me (since they've come from search engines), and even those couldn't figure it out. So the smolweb is, for the time being, off their radar.
@istvan - I think you've got the right of it. Not all info is useful or worth saving, but this experience has taught me a lot.
If what Plato said ("writing will be the death of memory") is true, how much more is the impression of eternal data security going to prevent the development of human memory? Living in the eternal present of a scrolling "feed" isn't good for the human mind, not to mention the soul.
They've done studies on what students retain... apparently we feel like we learn more when we read a textbook on a screen, but in general students retain data better when reading in a physical book. I wonder how it would have gone if the data had been presented in a gopher/gemini like format... contrasting a infinite-scroll data presentation with a pseudosense of "place" that you find in "following" a gopherhole. Maybe we would be more likely to engage alpha-brainwaves and think critically when we're connecting knowledge-acquisition to a sense of place, instead of an 'ephemeral flickering feed.'
( @blah_blah_blah - I mean empheral here with respect to our experience of it, rather than the feds. )
Not every byte is worth saving, but libraries/collections of data curated by intelligent human beings has historically been a real benefit for humanity. Think about the tragedy of the library of Alexandria, or what those celtic(?) monastaries managed to preserve in the middle ages.
Why isn't there a gutenberg.org mirror in geminispace? Is there? There should be. I don't mean the "self publish your own stuff" section of gutenberg, but the actual texts upon which everyone is hoping to progress mankind forward.
Maybe this deserves its own post in s/permacomputing or someplace similar.
What to do about lost pages? — I'm relatively new to a web that is smol/self-hosted. I'm enjoying the experience, so thank you. I've run into an issue (feature?), and wonder how you all dealt with it: Ephemerality. There is content on the fedi/smol web that could be lost forever. On the www, there's quite a bit of redundancy. If I can't find the article/story I'm looking for on one site, a quick search reveals multiple places that it's been backed up. I can't really think of many things that...
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Sun Jun 2 16:31:24 2024