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Gemini is Solutionism

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Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#21

Post by LAC-Tech »

barakm wrote: post #3

You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based. Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.

The problem with not gatekeeping is that you get all these people you don't want coming through your open gate.

Not every single thing has to include every single person on earth. If people want to use Gemini good for them.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#22

Post by systemvoltage »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #18

> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different, Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and huma…

> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians.

That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin.

The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#23

Post by akkartik »

I'm not yet sure how I feel about Gemini (I like inline links), but this post makes me think it's starting to gain some traction. It's past the "first they ignore it" and "then they laugh at it" phases and now into the "then they fight it" phase.

Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#24

Post by ecliptik »

Admittedly I up voted this not because I agree with it, but because I want more people talking about Gemini, both for and against it since it leads to healthy and constructive debate on a new technology.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#26

Post by square_usual »

brimble wrote: post #14
barakm wrote: post #3

You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based. Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.

Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it. IOW a web that's safe and user-controlled, again. Just a damn hypertext document browser that doesn't also bundle a spying suite and hand control of it to anyone by default. We should have realized when people started putting up troll pages that broke your com…

> Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it.

It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it. You don't have to throw the baby (gemtext missing inline links!) out with the bathwater.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#27

Post by eloisius »

brimble wrote: post #15
elteto wrote: post #7

I wondered the same thing... why invent a whole new thing? Making a web browser capable of displaying the Internet circa 1999 is not trivial but it is far, far, far easier than building a modern one. Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.

I think because the inevitable result of that is that you constantly land on broken pages, just by following links, even if you start in some kind of enthusiast area that caters to such a browser.

You could mitigate that by only linking to pages that implement the HTML subset deemed valid. And instead of linking away to another domain, you could syndicate those pages on a centralized domain so to prevent loading dangerous or slow content on the open web. We could call it something like Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#28

Post by dvt »

> The modern web sucks

I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown.

Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#30

Post by wmf »

adamrezich wrote: post #12
barakm wrote: post #3

You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based. Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.

> It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. > elitism (n.) the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society. where does this idea come from? why can't people make their own spaces in their own corners of the Internet without being considered "elitist?" is HN "elitist"? 4chan? Usenet? ZeroNet?

Text-only content is elitist ever since the masses started expecting everything to be video or at least have some stock images.
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