 So I've never been afraid to veer from the mainstream. I like alternatives I like trying out alternative stuff alternative internet protocols alternative internet platforms social media sites alternative software and Three of the alternative platforms that I've really pushed heavily on the YouTube channel here in recent months are Gemini Mastodon and Odyssey and I get viewer comments and questions all the time about those platforms. Hey DT It's been three months six months a year since you started using this have your thoughts have your opinions changed in any way So today I wanted to take a few minutes to address my thoughts on these three alternative platforms So the first thing I want to talk about is Gemini Gemini is an alternative to the modern web It is an alternative to HTTP HTTPS Think of Gemini as a modern-day gopher for those of you that were around in the early 1990s with the gopher protocol In the early 90s, we had basically two internet protocols that were competing We had gopher and the web the web went out But but a lot of us still have fond memories of the gopher protocol because it was just plain text and it was fast And it was kind of neat and it kind of died But now we have a modern version of gopher essentially with Gemini So if I open my Gemini capsule, which is Gemini colon slash slash distro dot tube I'm going to open it in the terminal Gemini client called M4 And this is Gemini colon slash slash distro dot tube It's my personal Gemini capsule and these days This is my main website if you will you know my Gemini capsule is actually my official site And a lot of people were very critical of me when I said that I was going to start doing a Gemini capsule as my main website I was going to get rid of my HTML site and they're like now you can't do that Sure I can because this is just essentially plain text It's very simple plain text that I mean if I actually open the source code for this It essentially looks almost exactly the same as as what you're seeing displayed on the screen The only difference is there's a little bit of formatting with the links But just a very small little bit of formatting so what I decided to do was I'm doing the Gemini capsule as my main site And then I have a script that converts the Gemini files which are again just simple plain text I have a script that will convert them for me into simple HTML very minimal HTML Which I then pushed to my HTTP site at distro tube comm So I still have a website and I still have a Gemini site But the Gemini site is actually what I actually work on and then I have a script that auto Magically creates the HTML site for me now getting back to my thoughts on Gemini I think a lot of people think my opinion of Gemini is going to kind of soften You know as time goes on that I'm gonna somehow start becoming critical of Gemini because you can't possibly like a internet Protocol that doesn't have inline links or images displayed or video Multimedia doesn't allow JavaScript. You can't possibly like that, but it's so plain. It's just text. Yeah, I love it Like the more I use it the more I like it not even kidding yet I love not having inline links in line links. Don't make any sense The old gopher protocol actually did it this way You couldn't have an inline link like in a paragraph if you wanted a link It needed to be on its own separate line And that's what Gemini is doing to the same that gopher did Gemini is doing it the exact same way and it makes sense Because when you have inline links and paragraphs you have all these links and these paragraphs Then you have all of this markup in in this paragraph to this syntax That doesn't really make sense Especially when you want to do a copy and paste or something of the source code it makes sense Hey, have a paragraph just plain text and then below the paragraph have the links related to that paragraph And each link is on its own separate line Which makes it really easy to manipulate these links if you need to with scripting if you want to do anything with Grip said and all can all of that, you know having everything on its own line Makes a ton of sense the lack of images. I don't mind either 99% of the images on a website don't even matter think about that think about all the images that are displayed on most webpages You know, it's just background images that you really don't even pay attention to you know Like the bullet points in a list oftentimes or images rather than a proper bullet point It's just you're putting images on the screen just to have images, you know your search buttons People replace the plain square gray buttons with actual images to make it look pretty But all of that stuff is slowing that web page down You know, you don't get any of this crazy stuff in Gemini because no images are displayed if for some reason I needed an image for a reference what I would do is I would you know, write my little blog post or whatever And then at the end I would have a link to an image You know, maybe they need to see some kind of reference photograph or something I would have a link to that image file and when they click that link to the image file What's what's it going to do? It's going to open that image in their image viewer on their computer Which should be the way to do this is the UNIX philosophy the image viewer should open images The web browser should not be displaying images So overall I really like the the gopher protocol all of your links are numbered Everything's keyboard driven if I hit six on the keyboard right now I could view my videos from 2021 So let's go follow that link and you see how fast that page opens and this is a lengthy page Because I've made a lot of videos so far, you know in 2021 them like key binding So G to go to the top capital G to go to the bottom and all of that And of course if I wanted to follow links 0 through 9 on the keyboard follows links 0 through 9 The single digit numbers if you needed to follow a link higher than 9 For example, if I wanted to follow link 12 what I would do is on mine I have colon set to like a VM command mode now by default and for its space space And then the number I have it set to colon and then the number So I would do colon 12 and hit enter and it would follow that link But that would open up my web browser because these are web links These are links to my videos over on Odyssey listed in reverse chronological order It's another thing that some people seem frustrated about is okay you got web links here Let me go back to the home page web links here are green for my color screen and Gemini links are purple And of course the web links will open up my web browser Which is brave and the Gemini links will and for I can handle those right so you've got two different internet protocols And they're opening in two different clients Why why don't you just have one client that opens all the protocols? Well, again, it's the UNIX philosophy the web browser should handle web links the Gemini client should handle Gemini links You know, I know that's frustrating to some people especially when you're used to the kind of Half-ass way that so many things are done with software and operating systems You're used to the way things were back when you used windows where your software was a jack of all trades Maybe it's master of none rather than focusing on one specific thing and doing that thing perfectly So for me my thoughts on Gemini, it's only improving. I'm really excited about Gemini It's becoming more and more popular and there's so many other sites that you could view on Gemini For example, well, here's tech rights for those of you that view tech rights on the web tech rights has a Gemini page as well. Some of the other ones that I know about I do want to mention One that I came across here and just posted the other day was those of you that host on Sourcehut now I use GitLab, but I know a lot of you guys use sourcehut sourcehut now is offering free Gemini sites The way you can host a free HTML site on GitHub or GitLab sourcehut let you do that as well You can have a free website with sourcehut But you can also do a free Gemini capsule if you prefer to do it that way So those of you that are already on sourcehut maybe take advantage of that The next alternative to the mainstream that people often ask me about is Mastodon. I've been on Mastodon for a couple of years. I started hosting my own instance of Mastodon Just a few months back a four or five months ago. I would say I started Distrotoot.com for those of you that want to sign up over there feel free. I don't hang out there much I mean I read my messages there, but I I'm not that active just for sake of time But it is a nice alternative to something like Twitter for example and the great thing about Mastodon is It's free and open source software. You can have your own instance of Mastodon It's not a central server the way something like a Twitter is because with Twitter There's only one instance of Twitter, right? You get banned from Twitter. You can't be on another Twitter There's not another Twitter right here Everyone can have their own instance of Mastodon their own set of rules or their own topics that they want to cover their own topics That they don't want discussed and it's a really nice Decentralized and and federated platform and a lot of people are Critical of Mastodon. Well, a lot of people have been critical of Mastodon for a long time And I keep seeing this becoming more and more prevalent in the free and open source software communities as people Trashing Mastodon a little bit because of the decentralized nature of it. A lot of people don't like that They don't they don't like the fact that it's not like Twitter where everybody is on one platform Everybody can talk to everybody else We're on Mastodon if I want my Mastodon instance to not be federated with certain other Mastodon instances And I do want that like I don't want to be Federating with a lot of Mastodon instances that are out there that are You know kind of crazy So, you know, I don't talk to those servers those servers May that maybe they don't talk to my server either and that's okay That's that's that's the purpose of Mastodon That's the purpose of being Decentralized is you don't all want to be in the same place on the same server with the same Overlords, right or if one one guy decides to ban you that's it You know your games over you're done It's kind of like the criticisms earlier that people had with Gemini and a lot of people's the negatives They see with Gemini. I see as positives This is the same thing with Mastodon a lot of the negatives people like to say are negatives about Mastodon I actually think are positives. So it's really point of view a lot of it, too Is comfort level a lot of people are used to using what they've been using they they're used to using Centralized services and when you use something Different, you know something that veers from the mainstream a little bit, you know, it's it's a little bit weird Right, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense until you start using it And then once you start using these kinds of decentralized platforms Then you can't go back to the old way of doing things You could never be on Twitter once you get used to using platforms like Mastodon You could never go back to Facebook and probably the alternative platform that I get asked about the most is odyssey odyssey.com which is of course the front-end to library We used to have a different front-end to library called library TV But it was kind of confusing because library is essentially a protocol and library is also a cryptocurrency library credits LBCs and it had you had three different things that all were named library now the actual Website is now named odyssey and that makes a lot more sense It's less confusing because now when people talk about library, you know They're specifically talking about either the desktop client or the protocol behind the desktop client And they're not talking specifically about the website and here recently I think why people are asking me about library slash odyssey is because there's a SEC lawsuit right now that's being filed against library the company behind the library protocol and People are worried about that lawsuit. What will it mean? Will it mean the end of library? No, and that's not what it means It's free and open-source software. Anyway, you know free and open-source software never dies What will it mean the end of odyssey dot-com odyssey dot-com? It's not a part of the lawsuit You know, it's not that's not what the SEC is worried about this website Even if odyssey dot-com went away Remember library is just a protocol free and open-source protocol as well Anybody could create a new front end a new website to the library protocol if they wanted to now overall What are my thoughts on odyssey dot-com as far as an alternative platform to YouTube? Yeah I think it absolutely is an alternative to YouTube. I think it's a viable alternative. I think it is the future So, you know, I'm one of the bigger creators on odyssey. I have a pretty substantial following 32,000 subscribers on odyssey That is a lot of subscribers on an alternative platform. I mean, that's that's about a third of the subscribers I have on YouTube. So, you know, it's Comparable, but it's actually much more impressive probably what I'm doing on odyssey because on YouTube You have potentially billions of people that view YouTube on odyssey, you know, the viewership is quite a bit lower But I get a lot more engagement also revenue the YouTube AdSense revenue compared to LB C donations over on odyssey They're comparable at times depending on the price of crypto over now right now crypto prices have crashed down So it's not a good time to compare numbers right now, but overall, I love odyssey I can't imagine not being on it I will continue to be on odyssey from now Until the end of time until until the end of I decide to no longer make videos or until odyssey itself goes away I can't imagine not being on odyssey these days. That's just become like second nature, you know I'm an odyssey creator, right and YouTube I may not be on in the future right now It makes sense to be on YouTube because still too many people view videos on YouTube You know if you want to have the most Eyeballs on your content and the kind of content I want now. I'm trying to spread messages about GNU slash links and free and open source software and the importance of Free and open source software. I want the most people to hear that message. It makes sense to be on YouTube right now Now I think YouTube will decline in the future. I think it has to I don't think you know, nothing lasts forever You know, nothing stays on top forever YouTube will eventually decline and people will look for an alternative and I think the alternative People are already starting to explore the alternative. The alternative is odyssey and you already see it There's so many creators on odyssey now Creators, you know If you follow, you know a lot of Linux creators just general tech creators and even things not related to tech I mean, there's so many Thousands of content creators now that are putting their content on odyssey and you get views on odyssey There's people that actually go to this site just to watch videos when I post a video a new video on odyssey I typically get you know a thousand 1500 views in the first 24 hours of it being published Now that's not great numbers compared to what I get on YouTube You know, that's probably you know 10 percent 15 percent of what I get on YouTube in the first 24 hours of a video But that's still not an insignificant number of people that are viewing my content on a free and open source Alternative to YouTube and I think that's amazing. So overall my thoughts on Jim and I Mastodon odyssey these alternatives to the mainstream. Yeah, I'm still big on all three of them I'm still going to promote all three of them all the time I I get people have criticisms about all three, but again, it really is From perspective, you know, because a lot of the complaints people have about all three of those platforms I see those as positives. So and you don't have to use them as like just because I like Jim and I doesn't mean You have to like Jim and I just because I'm on Mastodon doesn't mean you have to be on Mastodon, right? And if you don't like viewing my content on odyssey, well, you can still view it on YouTube If you don't like viewing it on either YouTube or odyssey, I bet you can come up with other ways to view my content I won't mention those on camera because the YouTube overlords may not like me mentioning those those kinds of alternatives But you have alternatives out there. Now before I go. I need to thank a few special people I need to think absy delis gave Lou Mitchell Alan Cummy orchid for 30 Chuck David David Dillon Gregory Lewis Paul Polytech Scott Steven spin wasn't Willie these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode You just watched it wouldn't have been possible The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well All these names you're seeing on the screen These are all my supporters over on patreon because the distro tube channel is sponsored by you guys the community If you'd like to support what I do, please consider subscribing over on patreon. All right guys. Peace. I Think the Gemini haters just miss Pornhub