The Tragedy of Gemini

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.

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.

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.

... 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.