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There's been some truly wonderful discussion percolating its way through Geminispace recently, on the internet in general and sometimes social media more specifically: what it is, what it could/should be instead, how various people/projects are trying to change it and how they are hitting or missing the mark. I don't really have strong, concrete contributions to make to the discussion just yet but wanted to make a post on the topic in order to:
Say how happy I am that Geminispace seems to be naturally attracting en masse just the kind of people who are inclined to have a discussion like this - I couldn't have wished for a cooler early community!
Help knit the discussion together - not everybody taking part has necessarily read everything everybody else has written, and this kind or organic inter-linking mechanism can be pretty important on the small internet.
Provide a little history and context and wider scope to some things - I don't mean to be presumptuous in assuming anybody needs me to do this, I'm just aware that a lot of folks are coming into Geminspace directly from the web without having spent transitional years in Gopherspace where some of this stuff has come up before.
Make a few quick comments of my own.
My entry point to the discussion was:
It's very well written, and I particularly enjoyed this paragraph:
> When we're relying on rapidly sharing other people's words it also encourages some really strange dynamics, pushing some people into the role of **influencer** where they accumulate more followers and more ability to shape narratives. That's a terrible thing, because who gains influence and follows is almost always an accident---a set of contingencies and coincidences that aren't only not meritocratic but are essentially just random. Like rivulets of rain down a window, the actual path that gets formed has almost no deep meaning to it and not moral significance: future drops follow the path because it is there not because it is good.
The discussion of retweeting/boosting in particular reminded me of something I had read at iolfree's capsule (which is current in "beta", so bear with him). Iolfree is, to my knowledge, the first person to mirror their `twtxt` (a "decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers") feed in Geminispace, and I saw a, umm, twt(?) from May wondering "How is it legal for them to make people viral who don't want to be viral.. twitter should be shut down and their assets siezed".
I'm not sure there's really a question of legality here, as people sign up to Twitter voluntarily and in principle agree to mechanics of the platform, but it's an extremely good question why we are building platforms where it's impossible or difficult to participate without making yourself susceptible to these kinds of effects.
Demified has a fairly scathing commentary on mainstream social media which comments on this general phenomenon of building platforms which facilitate various undesirable things by default:
In particular, they opine:
> The problem with social media is that all of the downsides are opt-out. You've got to opt out of posting everything to the public timeline by default. You've got to opt out of being followed by random strangers, or worse still having them send you private messages.
I strongly suspect they wouldn't object to "You've got to opt out of being retweeted/boosted" to that list.
Demifiend also makes the really important observation that even "alternative" systems like Mastodon or Pleroma which are actively trying to be better than Twitter are blindly repeating bad deicisions made by the faulty projects they seek to replace. This is, in fact, an endemic problem. One of my pet peeves is that open, decentralised, federating platforms are copying the corporate silo tactic of having homepages that provide absolutely zero insight into who makes up the community inside or what they are posting. Pixelfed does this, for example:
and tell me on what possible basis I am supposed to decide whether or not I want to join that instance over any other? Mastodon originally did this too, but no longer does. The likes of Twitter and Instagram do this to leverage people's curiosity and/or FOMO to force them to sign up, because centralised, commercial platforms have an innate need to "onboard" as many users as they can in order to monetise them and their content. Exploring content on those platforms without signing up is disallowed, because in the eyes of the people running the show anybody doing so would be a parasite. On the free and open internet, this ideology is generally rejected outright, so why on Earth are we copying bad design decisions demanded by it?
left_adjoint once again made an excellent contribution to the broader topic with the separate post, on which I wanted to say a few things:
Firstly, left_adjoint refers to:
> what I've seen people call the "small internet"
I don't claim any authoritative knowledge on the true origin or deep history of this term (though I think I can safely accredit the adorable "smol internet" variant to Shufei!), but my first encounter with it and - I am pretty darned sure - the use of it which made it "a thing" amongst the modern Gopher community at least, was through the writings of the user "spring" at the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic (be advised, all links below to spring's content are gopher links):
In particular, in early 2019 spring made two posts with "Small Internet" in the title, which I think are essential reading for anybody interested in the recent history of this movement. They're short and easy to read you and I strongly encourage you to check them out.
There are 8 other posts in the same vein in spring's phlog, and they are all equally accessible, so if you're even slightly enthused by the first two you may as well read them all. The ideas, philosophy and culture that these posts are about unquestionaly predate spring's writing, the Republic where they were published and even the Circumlunar Space universe within which the Republic is located. But to the best of my knowledge spring was the first one to give the whole thing a catchy name and to start producing something vaguely resembling propaganda. Though, now that I think of it, there is also papa's "Antisocial Media Manifesto" from March of 2018, far from unrelated:
(note that the Gopher server at grex.org is glacially slow. Seemingly always has been, seemingly always will be. Many clients will just timeout. If you're using VF-1, do a "set timeout 120" first and be patient)
There's the parallel term "Slow Internet" which has some currency as well. I don't know it's exact recent origin (I know it's piggybacking off "slow food", "slow fashion" and similar movements), and to my knowledge it doesn't have a manifesto or other foundational documents. I think it's considerably less widely used than Small Internet, which is perhaps a shame because I think tying into the broader "slow" movement is not a bad idea, and because this thing we're talking about doesn't necessarily need to remain small, in terms of number of users. Then again, "slow internet" has been used for decades to describe something frustrating and most searches for the phrase will probably bring up negative content which is entirely unrelated to what we're talking about.
Finally, left_adjoint writes in praise of rawtext.club and tilde servers, and calls for more of these, a sentiment I can only echo. I typically call these kinds of communities "micropubnixes", which I think actually may be a term coined by rawtext.club's admin cmccabe (unquestionably the leading modern scholar of pubnix history). To some extent, those communities which have opted to use the newer "tilde" terminology and have joined the (marvellous and inspirational!) tildeverse enjoy a little bit of a PR/awareness advantage over those who have not, so to help balance things out here are a couple of other micropubnixes you may not have stumbled upon yet (I will preferentially link to Gemini URLs below if the server supports it, but most of them are on Gopher too):
Apologies to anybody I've forgotten!
I haven't yet made any firm decisions or public announcements, but I do intend to institute a limit on the number of simultaneously active hosting accounts I will setup at gemini.circumlunar.space, in the relatively near future. The main motivation for this is to actively encourage more people to step up and offer hosting services of their own to the community, so that we can grow into a decentralised, resilient and diverse network without a few small points of accumulation. If you're not much of a writer but have some basic sysadmin chops, offering hosting space is unquestionably one of the most important contributions you can make to the growth of the Small Internet.
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