● 02.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

●● Geminispace Will be Better Off When All Users Are Self-Hosting Their Own Capsules

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 0bdb388ea3d686ad05ffe0841bafa93cSelf-hosting is Much Better for Gemini Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

↺ Video download link

http://techrights.org/videos/self-hosting-gemini.webm

Summary: Capsules in Gemini are easy to set up and maintain; they’ve lowered the entry barrier and we should collectively take advantage of that

THE TEENAGE years of people like myself weren’t “always online” or “always connected”; we’d dial up, do what we planned to do, then disconnect; yes, back then you’d get billed for time (duration online), bandwidth, or both (limits on bandwidth or set quotas associated with packages, with dynamic policies varying for times of day and ‘penalties’ for exceeding some softer thresholds).

I’m probably not at risk of offending or excluding anyone by saying that many homes around the world are now perpetually connected. Putting speed aside, as I doubt many places still use dial-up modems/Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) for Internet access. With over a dozen Gemini servers available, in many different computer architectures/programming languages, it’s no longer infeasible to host from home. Some ready-made solutions like FreedomBox simplify this even further.

↺ FreedomBox

> “Sure, there’s some learning curve involved, but the longterm gain is true autonomy, except maybe the DNS services (there are ways to bypass those too).”

In the video above I use last night’s incident in tilde.team to make a point; long downtime aside, they still (almost a day later) have a problem with certificates, so dozens of tenants have access issues for their capsule space. There’s nothing they can do to resolve this. This isn’t the first time or the first such hosting service that suffered prolonged downtimes. The mailing list of Gemini named some other incidents, sometimes resulting in days if not weeks of downtime. So users can and probably should take control. In my experience, running and maintaining one’s capsule is vastly simpler than running a Web site. Sure, there’s some learning curve involved, but the longterm gain is true autonomy, except maybe the DNS services (there are ways to bypass those too). Perhaps we’ll do some videos in the future to demonstrate how one can set up one’s Gemini capsule in only a few minutes. Judging by the growth of Geminispace (see below), many people have succeeded and the expansion accelerated this year. █

tilde.team

Image: capsules-2100

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