Some not-open-sourcer thoughts about the Gemini Project

[packbat]

About a year and a half ago, some folx came up with a new Internet thing that's sorta somewhere in between Gopher and HTTP/HTTPS in terms of complexity. We learned about it last month.

Firstly: we don't know what Gopher is. It sounds kinda impractical.

Secondly: for some reason, the Gemini folk call the HTTP/HTTPS internet "the web", as if their own collection of URL-addressed hypertext pages is not a web? We're going to call it a web, because...

...well, because it's a lot like the web we knew ... idk, in the 1990s or early 2000s? In bad ways, obviously - nothing about Geminispace is immune to inhabitance by anyone from casually bigoted jerks to fascists - but in good ways as well, and a lot of the good is innate to the design. Like Dreamwidth or AO3, this is a space primarily focused on text, where sites load quick and take little in the way of processor or memory to view, and a space that's not designed to sell you stuff.

A lot of spaces are trying to sell you stuff. Twitter and its clones - Tumblr, too, and I think Facebook - are trying to hook you in and keep you fascinated for hours, either because it makes them money or because (in the case of Mastodon and other Fediverse things) they just want a Twitter that's not Twitter. News sites are almost entirely ad sites and just incidentally happen to have the text and a few images from a news article somewhere in there. (And also crash constantly on our iPhone 6, because they've decided anyone using one is too poor to bother accommodating.) YouTube lets people upload videos and both YouTube and Twitch let people stream videos in the hope that they can serve video ads before, during, and after.

Geminispace ... feels like Eric Burns-White's old Websnark page, or like Linus Åkesson's website, or like ... well, exactly what it is: a lot of pages from people who want to put things in the world for others to look at, and who aren't really interested in gaming the system to be heard more widely. Weblogs, special-interest essays, weird server-side game things (remember Food Chain? that kind of feeling) ... it is a web where (most) things load immediately and site formatting is basically "I wrote a bunch of words and put it on a page for you". I don't know if there's anything else in our entire life that's felt like that, and Geminispace feels like that, at least for now.

We don't have any access to Geminispace as authors of words. It is a space which you access either by having the money and technical knowhow to configure a server for it or by asking someone else with that money and technical knowhow to let you use their server space - and that probably still requires technical knowhow, and we have no idea how much because they haven't said and they're the kind of people who assume everyone wants to program their own browser. It's less accessible than the fediverse, and we wouldn't be on the fediverse if we didn't happen to follow the Twitter of a sci-fi webcomics artist who happens to host her own instance and decide that we were were willing to gamble on her as an instance host.

And yeah, a lot of Geminispace people are on the fediverse, apparently, but we don't know them. And a lot of them seem to be the type who think "blocking other instances is Sabotaging The Fediverse" is a reasonable idea, when it is in fact so patently wrongheaded it's confusing.

Anyway, this is at least the third time and third space in which we've talked about being fascinated by this thing. We kinda wish we could let the open source devs know what impression their protocol is leaving on folks who are proud of making a buggy port of that Daleks game we played as a kid in PICO-8 and still don't know how to compile anything.