The author is 100% right about the effect of having formally designated spaces for things that you would think could happily exist as informal subspaces of a wi

The author is 100% right about the effect of having formally designated spaces for things that you would think could happily exist as informal subspaces of a wider environment. Cold engineering logic drove us to see that everything is just bytes and so everything can be served over HTTP. The same logic is used in the retail world to optimize away culture and quirk and nuance and difference: everything is just a product, so everything can be sold in just one superstore. I see the small Internet movement as not just about nostalgia (although it’s definitely a little bit about nostalgia), but about countering monoculture by prioritising things other than efficiency. Gemini doesn’t need to be extensible because if you want to do something different, you can use a different tool and they can happily coexist, because the objective is not to achieve a winner-takes-all network effect victory.