5 ms·

The Tragedy of Gemini

62 points by panic 6y ago

ruined 6y ago
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.
- kixiQu 6y ago
  Do you only want to hear from people like you? To only make your community with people like you?
  - NhanH 6y ago
    A lot of time, yes. If I’m looking for movies recommendation, I would try to find people who are most similar to me. Also, no one is using Gemini exclusively, the web still exists
  - peteretep 6y ago
    > from people like you 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
    - kixiQu 6y ago
      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
  - dancek 6y ago
    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.
  - ruined 6y ago
    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.
  - II2II 6y ago
    In a manner of speaking, yes. 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.
NhanH 6y ago
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
- toyg 6y ago
  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.
- II2II 6y ago
  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.
aaron_m04 6y ago
This isn't really related but I think it's interesting that the comments on the site are Mastodon toots.
lmm 6y ago
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.
- dancek 6y ago
  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.
  - bzb6 6y ago
    > You can learn something from everyone. That’s... extremely charitable.
    - lovemenot 6y ago
      Perhaps. And if so, it is charitable to those whose closed-mindedness prevents them learning something from anything and anybody.
    - iFreilicht 6y ago
      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.
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        This may be true ... ... 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.
invalidtaxonomy 6y ago
100% CPU usage when visiting this page makes me sad.
- ibn_khaldun 6y ago
  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.
627467 6y ago
The September internet is also the ad/bloat-driven internet. It's cool in its way too, but Gemini (at least for now) is meant to be a different place. Soon, we'll have easier publishing tools for Gemini, so soon September will come
andyjohnson0 6y ago
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?
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
seems the choice for users is more between: 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.
cxr 6y ago
I find Tim Berners-Lee's comments in "Cool URIs don't change" <https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI> to be highly relevant to Gemini: > 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.

62 points by panic 6y ago

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.

kixiQu 6y ago
Do you only want to hear from people like you? To only make your community with people like you?
- NhanH 6y ago
  A lot of time, yes. If I’m looking for movies recommendation, I would try to find people who are most similar to me. Also, no one is using Gemini exclusively, the web still exists
- peteretep 6y ago
  > from people like you 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
  - kixiQu 6y ago
    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
- dancek 6y ago
  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.
- ruined 6y ago
  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.
- II2II 6y ago
  In a manner of speaking, yes. 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.

NhanH 6y ago

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

toyg 6y ago
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.
II2II 6y ago
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.

aaron_m04 6y ago

This isn't really related but I think it's interesting that the comments on the site are Mastodon toots.

lmm 6y ago

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.

dancek 6y ago
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.
- bzb6 6y ago
  > You can learn something from everyone. That’s... extremely charitable.
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    Perhaps. And if so, it is charitable to those whose closed-mindedness prevents them learning something from anything and anybody.
  - iFreilicht 6y ago
    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.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      This may be true ... ... 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.

invalidtaxonomy 6y ago

100% CPU usage when visiting this page makes me sad.

ibn_khaldun 6y ago
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.

627467 6y ago

The September internet is also the ad/bloat-driven internet. It's cool in its way too, but Gemini (at least for now) is meant to be a different place. Soon, we'll have easier publishing tools for Gemini, so soon September will come

andyjohnson0 6y ago

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?

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

seems the choice for users is more between: 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.

cxr 6y ago

I find Tim Berners-Lee's comments in "Cool URIs don't change" <https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI> to be highly relevant to Gemini: > 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.