Sorry folks! The problem with RTC was my fault. I let myself be dependent on a domain renewal reminder email from the registrar… and that email never came. I’m renewing it now.
My gemlog host rawtext.club has been down for most of the day and it illustrates a problem I’ve seen regularly on the small web (particularly in the gemini space) : links that don’t work and pages/people who disappear. without any way to have information about why and how.
This was, of course, already the case with the traditional web but has somewhat counterintuitively by the centralised monopolistic Internet : when it goes down, it goes down for everyone and people talk about it everywhere.
If, let’s take a fictive example, Facebook is down for you, you simply head to Twitter to ask what is it about. And see the trending topic. And you continue your day, unworried. Or worried but you can’t do anything anyway.
I used to say about Mastodon that when a Mastodon server fails, we usually ask about it on Twitter.
The small net fall back to this problem that the blogosphere already had : if some content is down, is it:
a choice by the author to remove it?
a non-choice forced by life?
a technical problem that will nTever be solved?
a technical problem that will be solved as soon as the admin knows about it?
a technical problem which will be solved right now, they are working on it and don’t want to be bothered with emails telling them about the problem.
Solving this problem in a decentralized way open a lot of potential interesting questions. (see stuff like IPFS).
What about a kind of decentralized gemini? The text-only approach could make it a lot simpler and gemini has proved that it is useful.
The whole .club gTLD is down.
Yeah, but there was a problem with rawtext.club gemini server earlier I think. Now it’s fixed but down again with .club
How could a whole extension come down?
Apparently it can: https://nitter.net/getDotClub/status/1446118781856595969 . A lot of tildes were affected by this one.
Maybe hardcoding some IP address in the hosts file is a good idea.
Sorry folks! The problem with RTC was my fault. I let myself be dependent on a domain renewal reminder email from the registrar… and that email never came. I’m renewing it now.
Thanks a lot for all your work. This kind of stuff happen and as we are not paying for anything, we can only be grateful for every minute online ;-)
For me, it raises interesting questions but the outage is part of the life of a project like rawtext.club.
My gemlog host rawtext.club has been down for most of the day and it illustrates a problem I’ve seen regularly on the small web (particularly in the gemini space) : links that don’t work and pages/people who disappear. without any way to have information about why and how.
This was, of course, already the case with the traditional web but has somewhat counterintuitively by the centralised monopolistic Internet : when it goes down, it goes down for everyone and people talk about it everywhere.
If, let’s take a fictive example, Facebook is down for you, you simply head to Twitter to ask what is it about. And see the trending topic. And you continue your day, unworried. Or worried but you can’t do anything anyway.
I used to say about Mastodon that when a Mastodon server fails, we usually ask about it on Twitter.
The small net fall back to this problem that the blogosphere already had : if some content is down, is it:
Solving this problem in a decentralized way open a lot of potential interesting questions. (see stuff like IPFS).
What about a kind of decentralized gemini? The text-only approach could make it a lot simpler and gemini has proved that it is useful.