Gemini: The New Frontier

After reading evenfire's post...

Clicbait on Gemini

...that was about as BuzzFeed clickbate as I could come up with.

I've only been on gemini for a month or two now. Very similar to gopher, the internet I grew up with. In those days it was just interesting that people could post information and you could easily access it. There were no ads, no monetization. There was also no high production costs you have now with the large and extremely complex websites you have today. Everything was enthusiast created and enthusiast consumed. Most services were hosted on university servers, some on corporate systems that allowed employees to host services. And of course an handful of people running their own machines, switching over from the old dial up BBS to the new internet. That environment never became monetized so it never seemed to get too get flooded with clickbate.

I somewhat doubt that gemini will become monetized either. Basic text output, nearly no input. The assumed UX for gemini is reading flat files with separate media files and ASCII Art. I don't see this as an issue as it will keep a lot of the garbage out. But what I do wonder is what types of services will show up in the future. Right now the majority of pages are personal logs, with a few pages dedicated to our hobbies and interests. There already exists a few search engines which helps discovery. A few news feeds exist that are transposing HTTP sites, a few weather services that call government or public service APIs. I think the next big step to keep gemini going is the creation of more services. As for what they may be, I don't have a clue. Aside from searching through programming documentation online, I've mostly given up on the internet.

I also wonder how many people out there are tracking their capsule's visitation metrics. Most of us seem to link to other's posts, check the search engines' backlinks to see if anyone linked to us. Does anyone really keep track if you get one view or many? Does anyone even care about that in here? Probably not, without monetization we are all just posting about things we want to say. If we really wanted views gemini is probably not the place for us.

$ published: 2022-10-05 22:08 $

$ tags: gemini $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-10-05

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