Reducibility and nonreducibility between equivalence relations

We show that, for , the relation of -equivalence between infinite sequences of real numbers is Borel reducible to the relation of -equivalence (i.e., the Borel cardinality of the quotient is no larger than that of ), but not vice versa. The Borel reduction is constructed using variants of the triadic Koch snowflake curve; the nonreducibility in the other direction is proved by taking a putative Borel reduction, refining it to a reduction map that is not only continuous but `modular,' and using this nicer map to derive a contradiction.