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Gemini is Solutionism

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Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#71

Post by adamrezich »

systemvoltage wrote: post #22
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 liber…

you know, it is possible for a simple piece of technology to ideologically appeal to more than one named region of whatever arbitrary political identity matrix one chooses to view the world through.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#72

Post by knowledge-clay »

Barrin92 wrote: post #69
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…

>This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in th…

> I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.

I would not describe myself as a left anarchist, but I think that this is an extremely uncharitable analysis of a much more diverse and serious group of people that don't really have anything to do with the things you listed.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#73

Post by akkartik »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #60
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.

I think this is an interesting argument, but my question is why can't it just work in the browser I have with an extension? No matter what people say, modern websites with JS and HTML and such aren't going away. I can't just stick my head in the sand and only use this special browser since I use too many things that make my life better in meaningful ways that use the traditional protocols. Many of them wouldn't be po…

I use Firefox. When I click on a gemini:// link it opens it in Lagrange. Seems pretty seamless.

If you're not going to install Lagrange, I'm doubtful that you're going to install an extension either. This isn't about you personally, it's a statistical judgment about the market segment you're signalling yourself to belong to. People reluctant to install native software are also unlikely to install extensions.

Having a separate app provides some additional protection compared to an extension that can look over your shoulder at everything you browse. Lagrange runs in a separate process entirely, and it can only snoop on the Gemini websites I visit.

Re endgame, see 1.6 at https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

Me, I go to Gemini (and Mastodon, and the tildeverse, and plan.cat, and twtxt, and, and..) precisely because it has no hope in hell of adoption. If someone's posting there they're intrinsically motivated[1]. That's the stuff I want to look at. When I'm in small pools like these I'm less legible[2] to marketers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic

[2] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#74

Post by cyber_kinetist »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #64
square_usual wrote: post #50

I agree with the author, but from a different direction. The Gemini community has this ethos that stripping away all the styling etc. makes the internet about "content" again. Setting aside for the moment that the definition that content = text is unnecessarily reductive (and insulting to other forms of content - is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting i…

> people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols. > Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech! I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2…

Well, it still doesn’t seem to have escaped the narrow community of “geeks who are into tech-related things”. I’d really like to see things that I don’t already see on places like HN (because for these things I’ll just use HN).

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#77

Post by tcmart14 »

dvt wrote: post #28

> 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 perspecti…

If your grandma can install a web browser, she could install lagrange. If she knows how to navigate to 'facebook.com,' she can navigate to a gemini URL. If gemini got enough user share, lagrange or something similar would come installed on a computer by default. Gemini is not all that hard to use. From the user perspective, it is just like using Chrome, but the websites are more basic.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#78

Post by j4yav »

My understanding was that making it difficult to connect to, in order to keep out people who wouldn’t/couldn’t meet the bar, was an intended benefit and not an accident (whether that’s a good idea or not is an exercise for the reader, but the premise of this article seems to assume that it wasn’t the intent.)

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#80

Post by dexwiz »

I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.
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