Gemini's Killer App

Joel of innerteapot.com wrote about Gemini's focus on text.

To perhaps get bogged down in the technical details, I think Gemini owes a lot of this to its thoughtful design. Specifically here by not having allegories for CSS or Javascript. All that's left at that point is the text. There are no design or interactivity knobs to tune to make up for poor writing.

But I believe it's bigger than that. Gemini's design eschews extensibility, and a lack of styling options or a client-side programming language are just 2 examples of this larger choice.

Gemini will also never be attractive to corporate interests because it will never have cookies or any other tracking mechanism. Why is that? Because there are no headers in the format, and so nowhere to put the tokens for such a mechanism. This is where the web really truly separated from gopher, BBSes, and everything else that came before it: when you have support for arbitrary key/value pairs people can and will build anything. At that point it's a platform. Corporations love platforms.

If Gemini successfully holds off capitalism, the only motive for publishing into geminispace is passion. This is the real killer app: nobody has a job writing for Gemini. It's all passion, because Gemini doesn't allow the incentive structures to support anything else.

~tjp

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