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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This isn’t a recommendation or an actual suggestion, just a cautionary note
Image: Papers in London Tube
Summary: Popular movements and even some courageous publications have long been subverted by demonisation tactics, splits along unrelated grounds (such as controversial politics) and — failing that — technical sabotage and censorship; one must familiarise oneself with commonly-recurring themes of social control by altercation
I‘m almost 40, so I’ve lived through the Internet for over 2.5 decades (being connected the entire time, first over dial-up modem, i.e. sporadically) and I saw how NNTP/USENET/newsgroups got derailed, partly by takeover (e.g. Google ‘Groups’) and partly by copyright enforcement/claims/threats against ISPs. Recently, IRC too came under a wave of attacks and suggested replacements were partly or wholly centralised. In other words, proposed substitutes were, at best, red herrings.
> “Open Internet connections, federated sites (e.g. Diaspora Pods and Fediverse Instances), and wireless meshes have long been scapegoated.”
Self-hosting with Gemini is easy because bandwidth needs are compatible with residential connections. Self-hosting in this context means not in “one’s own domain” but in “one’s own home” (some just buy a domain and leave some third party to do the actual hosting). Clown computing is antithetical to both.
In any event, if companies and governments were eager enough to choke Gemini to death, here are 4 common tactics they might leverage:
Terrorism, child abuse and other common themes wrongly associated with Gemini (a newer strand is "hate speech")If (1) isn’t successful or isn’t sufficiently convincing, they can start fulfilling their prophecy by muddying the water or adding stings/honeypots, in essence planting some offending materialInternet throttling (a.k.a. “traffic shaping”) to discriminate or curtail adoption, as can happen with P2P and IPFS (DHTs). It helps when they (mis)use terms like “piracy” and weaponise the media to insinuate all such traffic should be presumed unlawful, economically damaging, dangerous etc.Inflaming conflict or internal disputes to split the development community and/or Gemini users. This sort of sectarian tactic (polarising groups) has long been mastered by Social Control Media companies, looking to drive up “engagement” by alienation, provocation, interjection of emotional reaction.
There are probably more, but those are the obvious and ‘offhand’ ones. Open Internet connections, federated sites (e.g. Diaspora Pods and Fediverse Instances), and wireless meshes have long been scapegoated. For the same reason, government officials perpetuate the idea that encryption is for terrorists, not for banks or for discreet lifestyles.
> “Personal attacks aren’t a surrogate/equivalent of face-based rebuttals (dealing with underlying evidence).”
Time will tell if adoption of Gemini space will be scaled down (Lupa can see nearly 1,700 capsules). There are many attractive facets to it. Earlier this year this Gemini mailing list was set to “moderated” because some people had become hostile, begun trolling and signed up for the list for the purpose of interjecting self-promotional spam, in effect confronting Gemini itself.
Knowing these patterns also helps one discern FUD/scapegoating, identifying when a particular publisher is being slandered and how. Personal attacks aren’t a surrogate/equivalent of fact-based rebuttals (dealing with underlying evidence). █
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