gemini://gemini.hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/re_the_devils

In short, this is working. Warts and all, it's working. Maybe there are some things to fix. Maybe we'll eventually fix them, and maybe we'll just continue. But I can't help but feel like Gemini is a roaring success by the only measure that really counts - there actually is a community here that is growing, vibrant and (mostly) healthy.

I'm a relative newcomer here I guess. This capsule's first post is dated from March 5th of last year. I had a capsule up for a few months the previous summer but had a pretty bad hardware failure with data loss. Gemini was pretty much exactly what I was wanting for the past twenty years really. I missed the start of the internet, as I didn't even have a computer until the turn of the millenium, but once I did get started I had just enough time to realize the potential of the web and start learning html before Web2.0 came along and began to slowly swallow as much of the open web as possible under corporate umbrellas. I always felt cheated for having missed out on those earliest years of the web. More to the point, I absolutely hated the change from thousands of interlinked island nations to everyone having a little studio apartment on a few big corporate servers. By the time I had my own blog it was so difficult for anyone to find it that it really was like shouting into the void. I hated everything about SEO and Adsense and social media features creaping into every space that they didn't fit. Gemini, with a spec that was actively designed to make it next to immpossible to extend, gamify, track and advertise immediately resonated with me. I didn't know if anyone would read my capsule, but it still felt like the place I should be.

In the process and over the couple of years that I've been resident and/or lurking here I've learned a lot from this community as well. I had never encountered the term permacomputing before, but it was already the direction I felt like I was heading in, having recently switched off all of my desktop computers in favor of a small Raspberry Pi armada, for the express reason of wanting a lower power draw. It was great to know that permacomputing was a thing that people were talking about. It's also been really cool reading about some of the smaller niches in the tech space such as Forth and Lisp, to read about people using OpenBSD as their main desktop OS, and to read actual poetry and short fiction. Yes, this place has a techie slant. But it's getting to be rather diverse, and some of the tech is definitely more on the niche side. Some of those writings lead me off to do a lot of reading, and encouraged me to experiment in ways I had never really thought to try before, such as fiddling around with Fortran, a language I still haven't written anything really large in but which I find to be fascinating and quite a breath of fresh air in that it's language constructs seem to encourage you to think about what the hardware is actually doing.

Like Slondr, I do like the idea of some more community discussions around possibly finalizing and clarifying portions of the spec, but I don't think we need any formal leadership. I proposed a little while back that we get together and talk about what some kind of federation between sites might look like on Gemini, since it was something that SkyJake had been talking about incorporating into Bubble. My thinking was that since so many of us like to roll our own, it was more likely that we'd get sites to interop by providing a spec than by someone creating a specific software package that could interop between other instances of itself. The fact that there aren't as of yet more Bubble instances tends to reinforce that in my mind. I do think that Bubble is just the beginning of a change, however, and we're likely to see a lot more interactive capsules coming online in the near future. It happened on the web, and I'm sure it will happen here. It's just likely to look a whole lot different in Gemini, and isn't likely going to involve siloing 99% of the users into one or two big sites.

Also, when you look at Bubble you realize that it's not an entirely Gemini stack anyway. SkyJake was very clever about how he designed the post editor to work around cutting and pasting segments together, in order to create longer form posts out of the limited space that you get to upload text in Gemini. Even so, I pretty much always just turn to the Titan upload option when I have something to write. I predict that we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing, where a capsule employs complementary protocols to make something bigger and better than the sum of it's parts. When you consider that a number of us are working on Misfin implementations, and that at some point we're likely to have a Gemini centric mail service using Misfin that you can access from a browser, that possibility starts to look very real. My own Misfin implementation I'm designing to work flexibly with tools ranging from Gemini clients to ssh to scp and rsync and possibly even git. This is what I find more encouraging about the way that Gemini is growing up. As functionality is being added it's not being tacked on to Gemini itself, but rather people are putting building blocks together from smaller pieces, much like the way Unix was designed to work. I doubt we're going to see huge monolithic programs on here with mountains of technical debt. What we're more likely to see is more instances of small and elegant tools composed in clever ways. This is part of the beauty of the small and under-specified spec to me. It's just irritating enough in it's incompleteness that "serious" programmers will leave it alone, while actually being perfectly adequate to build some really cool things with. There will also be a lot of small projects that get abandoned along the way, and that's fine. Their creators will still have some joy in the learning process.

Re: The Devil's Advocate

2023-06-27

Going forward

Tags for this page