Re: degrowth and its discontents

Héctor writes about the early web and the small web, and what he says is the loneliness of Gemini space.

degrowth and its discontents

Gemini is similar to the way the web was, around 1993. Gemini feels to him as though it is "devoid of human contact". In this connection he mentions measures such as IndieAuth, feed aggregators and ActivityPub, which complement the basic web stack, and which afford some means of connection with other users.

Protocol landscape of the mid-1990s

This got me thinking: why did the internet not feel lonely in the early 1990s?

The experience of the internet in those days was strongly influenced by the fact that there was a broader range of protocols which users must employ day-to-day for communication with *each other*:

finger

NNTP

SMTP

telnet

HTTP

IRC

ytalk

FTP

The social part of "being on the Internet" in those days simply didn't revolve around the web and HTTP. Yes, many people had webpages, but the web wasn't used for person-to-person communication. For that, we had SMTP, ytalk, IRC, NNTP and telnet. And "finger" was used for finding people to send emails to, seeing if they were online, and initiating ytalk with them. The web and finger were a sort of glue letting people find the *other* means of contacting each other.

Some of the ecological niches inhabited by these protocols still exist and still have their own protocols (e.g., SSH for much of telnet's job). But others have largely been superseded by the web, such as reddit.com doing what people used NNTP for.

To some extent, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram fulfil the role of finger and ytalk. But it's really not the same. You can no longer find someone's web homepage, and from that work out where their page is hosted, and send them a ytalk request. The webpages are no longer embedded in a broader ecosystem of protocols and conventions which allow people to contact strangers they found on the web.

Gemini's role in the protocol ecosystem

The early 1990s internet allocated responsibilities thus: discovery and chat initiation were handled by finger and ytalk, and HTTP was used for document delivery. Informally, other functions were layered on top of telnet and HTTP, e.g. via MUDs and talkers.

That layering of miscellaneous functions has now largely shifted to being carried entirely over HTTP rather than telnet. If the protocol doesn't support your exact use case, you set up a bespoke service over HTTP, the way you would do over a telnet-style virtual circuit back in the 1990s.

I think Gemini would do well to stick to the ecological niche that HTTP occupied in the 1990s. Miscellaneous functions should be build alongside, not on top, of Gemini. Let's go back to the days where protocols like ytalk and email and finger all worked on roughly the same addresses, informally coupled, rather than everything being bodged onto HTTP and Gemini.