Small Social Groups

2021-11-14

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Last night I attended a party hosted by a good friend. There were about 30 people in attendance, making it both the largest party I've been to and the largest party he's hosted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I got to catch up with some acquaintances I hadn't seen in months, and I got to meet some new people with common interests. Overall, I had a great time.

There were many other people present that I didn't know, didn't meet, and frankly didn't have a strong interest in meeting. Though many of them seemed to be very nice people, I wasn't sure I had the social energy needed to make new connections with them.

I've read before that humans tend not to have more than around 150 personal connections, meaning other humans whose lives and goings-on they maintain current knowledge about. It even makes a degree of sense to me to define and extrovert as someone who can maintain significantly more connections than the average, and vice-versa for an introvert. I tend to be an introverted person, so my number of personal connections is rather small. And of course close friends, those with whom I discuss personal issues or share other kinds of deep vulnerability, are even fewer.

Somewhat paradoxically, the recent evolution of social media seems to confirm this tendency in humans. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter were built on the premise of connecting millions of people all around the world--even alternative services such as the Fediverse see the large number of users it has as a point of pride. But the Facebook timeline has slowly been replaced by group chats in Messenger; large Discord servers are broken up into smaller channels and voice chats; small subreddits get frustrated when a post is added to r/all. Huge communities are interesting for a while, but eventually people almost always return to small groups in which they can get to know every single person.

Some Gemini users generate statistics about the number of IP addresses in Geminispace, the number of accessible pages, and so on. These statistics are great to have, but I don't feel a strong urge to make those numbers grow as much as possible. If the community is of high value, people will want to join and engage. And due to the nature of the protocol, no-one can force one to be participant in a larger group that what one feels comfortable with--very unlike the big social media sites.

Does this lead to an "us and them" mentality about those who are not part of the in-group? It can, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Close-knit communities protect themselves by rejecting those who don't seem to be able to assimilate into those communities. Sometimes that rejection happens rightly, sometimes wrongly. It's up to each community to figure out where the line sits.

This spirit is, in a way, deeply ingrained in how Gemini currently operates on a technical level. It takes some knowledge and interest to invest oneself in learning how to host a server, join a tilde, or write a CGI script. These things are not hard because the Gemini community has artificially made them hard to keep outsiders out. They're simply the nature of running a restricted-feature protocol, built by people who prefer CLI tools and low-level programming. I see nothing wrong with that.

One of Gemini's other strengths is its ability to segment itself into small overlapping groups. One of the hallmarks of social relationships is that friend groups are not identical--a given friend is not acquainted with some of one's friends, and that friend has friends with which one is not acquainted. Gemini is similar: feed aggregators will often have some overlap of content, but for the most part, different people like different capsules and pay attention to them over others. This is the opposite of what modern social media does, with a constant stream of friend and follow suggestions, trying to connect more and more people all the time.

I appreciate both of these aspects of Gemini, and it's part of what drew me to the protocol to begin with. A smaller, slower Internet is a more personal Internet, a more understanding Internet, and a more healthy Internet. Most interesting of all, that health is driven by aspects of social interaction that larger parts of the Internet seem to want to break down.

Last night's party was a lot of fun, but it was also quite draining. I still have a bit of a lingering headache from the noise of 30 people all talking at once. I think next time I'd prefer a group of about six or seven.

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[Last updated: 2021-11-14]