digital frontiers fold ever inward. gemini is a little secret nook carved out behind the clubhouse in the corner of a hidden cul-de-sac of a massive global labyrinth. there's no wall, it's just hard to find unless you know the way. there's no tragedy, it's just not everybody chooses to walk the paths you chose to walk.
we're all running away from everyone forever. it's okay. that's the point. when we get out here we find the people like us.
I absolutely mostly want to hear from people with similar attributes to me, similar fundamental guiding principles about what makes someone good or bad, and so on, but I'd also like to hear from people with very different experiences to me. I don't think these are especially incompatible ideas
Well, in this case, "someone like me" is enforced by technical abstruseness as meaning someone who knows their way around a shell prompt. That's value-neutral in of itself, but you can see how it ends up selecting for certain views on the world
We can belong to many communities, and indeed we have many different facets or identities. That's what it's like to be human. Attending a chess club doesn't mean you cannot also hang out with tennis players.
So yes, the small internet movement seems to be about esoteric technologies and only people interested in them will join. But I don't see that as exclusionary on a personal level. It's just a weird hobby.
Community, even diverse community, requires commonality of some sort. Everyone has a few people they relate to a bit more than others, and that's valuable. Subcultures and esotericism are one way to find those people. And none of this means that everyone who fits must fall into whatever boring conformity you're imagining.
Most people are nothing like me and i've definitely suffered for it. If you don't have that problem maybe you don't need to go looking for people like you.
It is possible to have a community where people disagree, voice their disagreements in a civil manner, and try to understand the other side.
Likewise, it is possible to have a community with a plurality of interests where people explore interests outside of their own.
I suspect the size of the community, rather than exclusivity, is the driving factor. I have lived in small isolated towns a couple of times. These were by no means social utopias, yet I did find that people were more interested in the ideas of other people within their community. This is in stark contrast to the Internet where you look around for communities that reflect yourself, and that are more trigger happy when it comes to dissenters.
In that sense, being accustomed to cli and able to use gemini is no different than community of people who plays Go, Shogi or fan of Liverpool football team pre 2000. I’m not entirely sure being not too popular is a reason to be sad — not everyone needs to be Real Madrid fan
A boomer would find your comment curious. Before Manchester United struck gold with the Class of ‘92, Liverpool were the automatic favorites every year and dominated the English league for more than a decade, accumulating plenty of glory-hunter supporters. Obviously they shrunk in the Premier League era after a series of bad years, but they’ve always had one of the largest and most insufferable fanbases.
I would suggest that being able to use Gemini is different.
It is probably better to think of Gemini in terms of books than technology, with Gemini being more aligned with novels. You don't have to be an avid reader to enjoy a novel, just as you don't have to be a graphics designer to become a novelist. The austere presentation may not appeal to some, yet it has relatively little to do with what can be contained within the pages or who can access it.
I would also argue that Gemini is very usable from the reader's point of view. Suggesting otherwise says more about technical literacy than anything else. GUI clients are available for the major platforms and are straightforward to install on Macintosh and Windows, so the only real barrier to entry is being able to install one's own software.
Exclusivity and elitism get a bad rap. The most important ingredient for a high-quality community is high-quality people, and to keep out the lower-quality people you need to have barriers to entry. I suspect that most Gemini users are smart enough to realise that, whether they'd admit it or not.
I strongly disagree about "lower-quality people". Yes, some people post low quality content, say horrible things and behave antisocially. Yes, in a community you want to restrict destructive behavior (by excluding people if need be).
But deep inside we all are, at times, selfish and evil, and at times, beautiful and wise. You can learn something from everyone. But you need to meet people at their terms. For some, it's over an esoteric internet protocol that you need to be a geek to use. And for some, it's over a glass of cheap lager in the backyard of an auto repair shop.
It's just the way it is. You can learn something from the biggest idiot, they make mistakes that you never thought possible. You just have to watch and learn.
... but if idiots are merely mistake-generating engines, then any one source of entropy (or representative sample) is equivalent to any other, or at least so long as interaction, longitudinal, and scaling effects are excluded, and even those can be reasonably easily acquired. Representations are readily obtained.
Expertise and skill are definitionally rare, expensive to acquire, expensive to assess, and readily discouraged or convinced a nonproductive platform or environment simply is not worth their bother. Rare, hard to find, hard to assess, easily spooked.
I don't know... This argument makes sense to me in theory but in practice I find it hard to implement successfully, as someone who manages a medium-sized online community. It reminds me of the "You only need 1000 good customers" article. Sure, but unless you bring in 100K you're not going to find those 1000.
So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community which I think is also essential, and instead of the 1000 good members you have 100 and they're all clones.
As a result I've opted for the opposite approach where I'm very welcoming to everyone and try to only get rid of the worst of the worst, and we have a great, diverse set of very skilled and interesting people but a lot of them leave rather quickly because they don't want to deal with the 90k less well-behaved members.
So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community
If the community consists of people who are uncomfortable with the feature creep and privacy loss on the modern web, I don't consider Gemini to be an artificial barrier.
To try to explain my reasoning, to join the Vegan community you need to stop eating animals.
The barrier to entry described in the post is technical, it's orthogonal to the properties you cite. For example look at signal, it's also made for people who are uncomfortable with privacy loss but it's still accessible to non technical people.
I would argue that the early web had similar technical barriers. Not to gatekeep but because it was young.
I also think that setting up Nginx or Apache is only considered easy because we know how to do it.
As far as I know, nobody has written an easy blogging app for Gemini. Ironically, if someone did do this it would likely be web based because of the need for an app like experience which Gemini does not support.
Furthermore, Sorts Mills Goudy is a (very nice but) inherently small typeface and should be bumped up to about 18-20px. This is especially needed due to the page’s dark layout.
Slightly off topic: I've just installed GemiNaut and am having a look around the Geminispace. Looks rather facinating and fast. Anyone care to suggest interesting landmarks and places to visit?
1) a system where doom-scrolling, ad-tech/tracking, and algorithmic milking of users has been normalized, and where the info-bubbles are a by-product of the design (due to radicalization of users and content recommender engines)
2) a system where the users are a homogeneous group but lacks both the size to form bubbles (e.g. bubbles large enough to get noticed by the rest of the system/community).
We used to say until well into the late 90ies "the Internet is finally mainstream", as an off-handed remark when somebody obviously non-Technical started behaving in an entitled way. It was nothing other than in-group/out-group signalling. It's the same type of signals that lead to bubbles in the first place. The sad thing is that the bubbles we have seen on the Web are increasingly toxic because the way FAANG (and all the FAANG copycats) think it should work.
Yesterday I was on YT with a fresh account, a VPN and a totally new hardware, and got immediately a recommendation for "Titania McGrath" (which IMO is funny), but I also know the next videos YT will show me after watching it is radicalizing trash that tries to convince me that I should fight the "woke" ideology. It is almost like in the first days of every new online identity platforms make people "choose their battle and weapons" ...
Bubbles are normal and they would still exist in gemini:// but they would be a lot less toxic than when you have sh1t merchants like FAANG shaping people's ideology.
(organic) info-bubbles are a good thing. But what we have is a situation where Web companies like FAANG are in the business of producing them artificially. The more isolated people are behind their little screens the better for these companies.
> Most URN schemes I have seen look something like an authority ID followed by either a date and a string you choose, or just a string you choose. This looks very like an HTTP URI. In other words, if you think your organization will be capable of creating URNs which will last, then prove it by doing it now and using them for your HTTP URIs.
Swap out the topic of URIs and stability for the kinds of content that Gemini is supposed to carry, and we've got the same situation: people mistaking practices—like breaking your URIs all the time, or overly stylized content (including the linked article)—as something that the web demands.
Here's an exercise: suppose we checked the personal homepages of the people who've been suggesting Gemini is a good fit for the problem at hand, what would happen? Would we find that the content there can be cleanly moved to Gemini space? If not, why?
The very next thing TBL says about Cool URIs:
> There is nothing about HTTP which makes your URIs unstable. It is your organization.
This is a softer way of saying, "you are the problem (not HTTP)".
I think the real tragedy of Gemini is that although its existence is a reaction to a genuine problem, what it proposes as a solution is a piece of tech that, in addition to having new problems of its own, it also makes some nebulous promises, doesn't address the underlying problem, and rests upon some less-than-rational arguments not rooted in clear thinking or even clear understanding. It's another instance of a bad solution to a problem making that problem worse. This happens when bad solutions capture the attention of people concerned with and/or affected by the problem, and then they divert resources away from the problem instead of allowing those resources to be better put to good use—i.e., into efforts that can actually be effective.
29 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 77.5 ms ] threadwe're all running away from everyone forever. it's okay. that's the point. when we get out here we find the people like us.
Also, no one is using Gemini exclusively, the web still exists
What constitutes someone like me?
I absolutely mostly want to hear from people with similar attributes to me, similar fundamental guiding principles about what makes someone good or bad, and so on, but I'd also like to hear from people with very different experiences to me. I don't think these are especially incompatible ideas
So yes, the small internet movement seems to be about esoteric technologies and only people interested in them will join. But I don't see that as exclusionary on a personal level. It's just a weird hobby.
Most people are nothing like me and i've definitely suffered for it. If you don't have that problem maybe you don't need to go looking for people like you.
It is possible to have a community where people disagree, voice their disagreements in a civil manner, and try to understand the other side.
Likewise, it is possible to have a community with a plurality of interests where people explore interests outside of their own.
I suspect the size of the community, rather than exclusivity, is the driving factor. I have lived in small isolated towns a couple of times. These were by no means social utopias, yet I did find that people were more interested in the ideas of other people within their community. This is in stark contrast to the Internet where you look around for communities that reflect yourself, and that are more trigger happy when it comes to dissenters.
It is probably better to think of Gemini in terms of books than technology, with Gemini being more aligned with novels. You don't have to be an avid reader to enjoy a novel, just as you don't have to be a graphics designer to become a novelist. The austere presentation may not appeal to some, yet it has relatively little to do with what can be contained within the pages or who can access it.
I would also argue that Gemini is very usable from the reader's point of view. Suggesting otherwise says more about technical literacy than anything else. GUI clients are available for the major platforms and are straightforward to install on Macintosh and Windows, so the only real barrier to entry is being able to install one's own software.
But deep inside we all are, at times, selfish and evil, and at times, beautiful and wise. You can learn something from everyone. But you need to meet people at their terms. For some, it's over an esoteric internet protocol that you need to be a geek to use. And for some, it's over a glass of cheap lager in the backyard of an auto repair shop.
That’s... extremely charitable.
... but if idiots are merely mistake-generating engines, then any one source of entropy (or representative sample) is equivalent to any other, or at least so long as interaction, longitudinal, and scaling effects are excluded, and even those can be reasonably easily acquired. Representations are readily obtained.
Expertise and skill are definitionally rare, expensive to acquire, expensive to assess, and readily discouraged or convinced a nonproductive platform or environment simply is not worth their bother. Rare, hard to find, hard to assess, easily spooked.
So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community which I think is also essential, and instead of the 1000 good members you have 100 and they're all clones.
As a result I've opted for the opposite approach where I'm very welcoming to everyone and try to only get rid of the worst of the worst, and we have a great, diverse set of very skilled and interesting people but a lot of them leave rather quickly because they don't want to deal with the 90k less well-behaved members.
If the community consists of people who are uncomfortable with the feature creep and privacy loss on the modern web, I don't consider Gemini to be an artificial barrier.
To try to explain my reasoning, to join the Vegan community you need to stop eating animals.
I also think that setting up Nginx or Apache is only considered easy because we know how to do it.
As far as I know, nobody has written an easy blogging app for Gemini. Ironically, if someone did do this it would likely be web based because of the need for an app like experience which Gemini does not support.
Soon, we'll have easier publishing tools for Gemini, so soon September will come
1) a system where doom-scrolling, ad-tech/tracking, and algorithmic milking of users has been normalized, and where the info-bubbles are a by-product of the design (due to radicalization of users and content recommender engines)
2) a system where the users are a homogeneous group but lacks both the size to form bubbles (e.g. bubbles large enough to get noticed by the rest of the system/community).
We used to say until well into the late 90ies "the Internet is finally mainstream", as an off-handed remark when somebody obviously non-Technical started behaving in an entitled way. It was nothing other than in-group/out-group signalling. It's the same type of signals that lead to bubbles in the first place. The sad thing is that the bubbles we have seen on the Web are increasingly toxic because the way FAANG (and all the FAANG copycats) think it should work.
Yesterday I was on YT with a fresh account, a VPN and a totally new hardware, and got immediately a recommendation for "Titania McGrath" (which IMO is funny), but I also know the next videos YT will show me after watching it is radicalizing trash that tries to convince me that I should fight the "woke" ideology. It is almost like in the first days of every new online identity platforms make people "choose their battle and weapons" ...
Bubbles are normal and they would still exist in gemini:// but they would be a lot less toxic than when you have sh1t merchants like FAANG shaping people's ideology.
(organic) info-bubbles are a good thing. But what we have is a situation where Web companies like FAANG are in the business of producing them artificially. The more isolated people are behind their little screens the better for these companies.
> Most URN schemes I have seen look something like an authority ID followed by either a date and a string you choose, or just a string you choose. This looks very like an HTTP URI. In other words, if you think your organization will be capable of creating URNs which will last, then prove it by doing it now and using them for your HTTP URIs.
Swap out the topic of URIs and stability for the kinds of content that Gemini is supposed to carry, and we've got the same situation: people mistaking practices—like breaking your URIs all the time, or overly stylized content (including the linked article)—as something that the web demands.
Here's an exercise: suppose we checked the personal homepages of the people who've been suggesting Gemini is a good fit for the problem at hand, what would happen? Would we find that the content there can be cleanly moved to Gemini space? If not, why?
The very next thing TBL says about Cool URIs:
> There is nothing about HTTP which makes your URIs unstable. It is your organization.
This is a softer way of saying, "you are the problem (not HTTP)".
I think the real tragedy of Gemini is that although its existence is a reaction to a genuine problem, what it proposes as a solution is a piece of tech that, in addition to having new problems of its own, it also makes some nebulous promises, doesn't address the underlying problem, and rests upon some less-than-rational arguments not rooted in clear thinking or even clear understanding. It's another instance of a bad solution to a problem making that problem worse. This happens when bad solutions capture the attention of people concerned with and/or affected by the problem, and then they divert resources away from the problem instead of allowing those resources to be better put to good use—i.e., into efforts that can actually be effective.