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Here's fodder for s/discuss. How worried should we be about centralization in Geminispace?
2023-05-16 · 1 year ago · 👍 Mirari
not really sure how this can be "fixed", a site is usually central
I think it's OK to have a few 'centralized' spaces, especially for discussions and sharing links. The core of Geminispace IMO is personal writing and capsules, but every good human endeavor needs a few gathering places.
tl;dr houses : personal capsules :: public squares : {Antenna, Station, Bubble, k͠t͠p}
It's a good concern to have, but I don't think we should be worrying too much about it right now. Gemini is small and simple enough where the community can really easily create and move to new services if the need comes up. And Bubble in particular seems really good at making sure you can export/share content to other places.
Really I think the bigger problem facing gemini is link rot caused by too much decentralization. If the main way for people to participate is through setting up their own capsule, I think it increases the liklihood that content will disappear if people get bored and move on.
@moddedBear good point about link rot
@eph:
> every good human endeavor needs a few gathering places.
Well put, and I like your analogy.
personally I'm torn on the subject. I think time will tell - if most of my time in Gemini is spent chasing down station and bubble notifications then I think there's a problem. The current crowd seems too averse to centralization to let much happen but newcomers may prefer these services to long form gemlogs and antenna. we shall see.
I'm happy to see new things being tried and happy that there is also healthy discussion around whether it's a good idea.
I never thought of Gemini about being about "federation". Federation is a cool idea but also one that people have been attempting to solve for many years without much success. Most of the successful federated ideas are decades old. Email being the most prominent.
So for me, Gemini is about the ability to have a simple interface and simple protocol. The fact that more people can have their own capsules is a *byproduct* of that, not the ultimate goal.
tldr; Gemini is about users, not authors.
@sirwilburthefirst what is the motivation for simplicity behind the curtain if not accessibility? As I see it, the ability to have one's own capsule is a big part of that
The importance of having one's own capsule is not something unique to gemini. I think everyone who uses the web should have their own website - some place of their own. And sure, not *everyone* wants to, and that's fine. But it should be encouraged and made as easy as possible.
@satch I should clarify that I was not around the early days of Gemini so I'm not speaking to what their motivation was in designing it. This is just my opinion as a fan.
It's about user experience. I as a user browsing know what I'm getting when I open a Gemini page. The content itself I may or may not like but I know what the experience is going to be.
In contract the web is an unknown when you click a link. It might be a pleasant experience or it might be quite jarring and unpleasant. It seems to be the latter more times than the former.
Simplicity enforces the good user experience. There's only so many things a site can do, when means there only so many experiences the user can have.
@sirwilburthefirst this is a very important aspect of gemini, but by no means the central goal from a design perspective, to my understanding. That’s because while there are many unpleasant experience one can have on the web, the huge silos have resulted in predictable experiences. When you use Instagram or YouTube, you know the user experience you’re going to have.
where Gemini differs is minimalism. Yes, part of the goal of minimalism is a peaceful user experience. But a very important part of minimalism is a low bar to entry for actual full participation.
The fact that many people will never host their own capsule is in part due to the disconnection they feel from the technology they use which results from the bloated web.
Google seemed benevolent 20 years ago. GitHub seemed too for a long time. Now look at them. Centralization seems fine until it isn’t.
I don’t think federation is the right model for everything.
I think community ownership and management could work for “/s/“ forums.
I also think the “/u/“ spaces would work better if users could host them as single-user blogs. Tildes could host multi-user instances.
One other solution that helps break centralization on the wider Internet is when a user owns a domain but buys the service (e.g email). Not sure if it was ever used on Gemini or how to apply it inthis case.
I think centralization is a risk. We should try to avoid it.
@satch The silos on the web are places where users hang out, but they still link out to other places on the web. If you click a link on Twitter or Facebook you are going to an external site, outside of the silos and the UX is a major unknown in those cases.
Of course, minimalism is a big reason for why Gemini's UX is known, I agree with that.
@satch What Gemini has not yet done is make chatting with people simple. I have my own Tinylog. How do I reply to a message from someone else's Tinylog? I have no idea. I imagine there might be a way, but I haven't figured it out. That isn't one of the simple things Gemini gives you. Maybe it should.
So while everyone living in their own capsule is a nice dream, we are still a ways off from that. It will probably take some real changes to text/gemini in order to achieve some of these things. But is there an appetite for that?
@emilis The way I plan on treating /u/ is, I'll write posts on my own site, then create posts on /u/ to have discussions. It's the equivalent of "blog comments" to me.
@sirwilburthefirst I have the same plan for my /u/
in my opinion, though, gemini isn't meant to be for easy chatting. Long form discussion is already easy enough, we have IRC and Matrix etc (and some better clients would be nice but they shouldn't be on Gemini).
I think Bubble is super convenient for this kind of conversation we're having now. I just don't think people should rely on it, especially not on one instance, and I think that reliance is the tendency.
Also, there's not an appetite for changing text/gemini, for better or for worse. I'm happy with it as it currently is, although I'm not fundamentally opposed to change if something really good is proposed. Many are.
@sirwilburthefirst:
> I have my own Tinylog. How do I reply to a message from someone else's Tinylog?
The Tinylog client is the answer there. Tinylogs themselves are just a way for broadcasting your messages. The clients are supposed to fetch everyone's logs and track the reply/thread connections.
@satch:
> this kind of conversation we're having now
Implementing this kind of a chat via multiple instances is technically possible, just look at ActivityPub. But it's a ton more complicated than what we have here. Tech/apps built on Gemini should IMO be somewhat on the same level of complexity than Gemini itself.
@skyjake That would mean that the client also needs a way for me to post messages to my Tinylog. I haven't seen one that does. I currently use some custom code that allows me to add new logs.
Maybe ideally Titan would be used for this. But the client needs some UI to allow replies. I personally don't know what the format is for a reply. So I've never done it.
Ideally imo, the client would be the browser. The browser can detect if a page is a Tinylog and display some additional UI for replies.
@skyjake yeah there’s some truth to that - but it doesn’t have to be as complicated as ActivityPub, that’s for sure
I think federation could be done very well
My initial thought is that the difference between the wider web and gemini space is that a large percentage of the people posting in a place like this DO have their own places and their own blogs and whatnot. Whereas on the wider internet a lot of people have, say, a Twitter account, and nothing else. So if they lose that, they lose everything. I think you need some places to gather, and it's okay if some of those places are on the bigger side. But it can't be the only place you have a digital identity and fingerprint. I think it's more important to preserve that culture than it is to try to break a big forum into smaller forums.
@lori i agree
That’s the key thing, it’s about reliance
Preserving the culture of having homes, not just town squares
I wrote a (too long) comment here:
gemini://gmi.bacardi55.io/gemlog/2023/05/18/reflexion-about-bubble-part-2/
@sirwilburthefirst : The last paragraph is dedicated to your tinylog comments :).
It would be cool if we could add links to our gemlogs that show up in our u/ feeds by default
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