2023-06-20 - Four years of Gemini!

Today is the fourth anniversary of the public announcement of Project Gemini. I promise that nobody, not a soul, is more surprised than I am that an average of one hundred thousand working Gemini URIs have appeared per year since that announcement. I'm more grateful than I can convey that so many people have responded so positively and energetically to the idea of a smaller, simpler, saner online space, and I continue to regularly feel worse than I probably should that I didn't do a better job of handling that response.

I've tried, and think I've succeeded, to be a little more engaged with Gemini this year, both in an official capacity (as seen so far mostly in housekeeping of this domain), as well as in attending to some of my personal software projects and online spaces. It's definitely possible to overstate how much I've done, and I'm not trying to do that, but it's certainly not nothing, it's certainly already more than I did in 2022, and I'm certainly not done for the year yet. Stay tuned for some long overdue updates to the FAQ and other official resources later this summer. Other changes after that, too. Nothing earth shaking, but slow and steady stuff that I hope will build up motivation and commitment in me, and rebuild trust and respect and goodwill toward my project stewardship in the community. I don't want to make promises, but spec updates, or at least concrete proposals for such, by the end of this year are on the table.

Last year, in my "Three years of Gemini!" post, I pointed out that despite no progress on the spec and a near total lack of communication or leadership from me, the Lupa stats showed that Geminispace was still growing. Well, the space continues to grow, which is good, although it's true the rate of growth is decreasing, but, hey, growth for the sake of growth shouldn't be the goal of anything, and sure isn't the goal here. This year instead I just want to quickly say how happy I am with how diverse and multi-faceted Geminispace has become. No, really!

It's become common as mud to hear the opposite of this, to find folks insisting that Geminispace is a bland, homogeneous mass of tedious tech talk exchanged within an insular community of tech-obsessed hypernerds, the only people who can figure the thing out in the first place. Well, compared to this time last year, I personally feel much better informed about, much more in touch with, just what's out there in wider Geminispace, beyond the confines of the small circle of people that I try to follow closely. And I'm very happy to report that this opinion is nonsense. Some of the stuff I myself have previously written about the demographics of Geminispace was nonsense, too!

I'm not saying things are perfect, I'm not saying there isn't room for more non-tech talk from non-tech people, and I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't try to make the place even more diverse and accessible than it is. None of those things are true. There are kernels of truth beneath all the nay-saying. But the problem sure is overstated. It looks a whole lot worse than it really is if all you ever do is camp out on one of the big aggregators. There's a lot of stuff out there that's not on Antenna or Cosmos or CAPCOM. Some of the people writing it probably don't even know what Antenna or Cosmos or CAPCOM are! That's great! That's no slant against those services. Community aggregators are valuable things and I'm very grateful to the people running them. But no small handful of such services could ever genuinely be "the front page" of Gemini, and it's a mistake to treat them as such. The big aggregators are instead the tip of an iceberg. It's an admittedly modest iceberg, it might even bounce of a sufficiently unsinkable ocean liner, but I promise you that if you dive deep enough you'll find non-tech-obsessed highschoolers using web front-ends to make cringey posts about their first loves in Geminispace. You'll find grieving widowers. You'll find poets. You'll find slice of life journals by people who rarely talk about computers. Even amongst the strictly tech focussed Geminauts, you'll find people boldly experimenting with making faster paced, more interactive, more social kinds of capsules than has been traditional thus far, and you'll find people for whom that is an entirely unappealing prospect swearing they'll stick to older ways. So long as everybody stays civil and developers stay within the spec, there's nothing wrong with that difference of opinion.

There's no reason at all for only one kind of person to use Geminispace, with all of them doing it in the same way, for the same purpose. It would be frankly pretty darn weird if that's the way it was. Thankfully, it doesn't really seem to me like we're on that track at all. The early adopter demographics may have been skewed, and the easiest points of entry to the space might still emphasise that bias, but there's definitely diversity out there, on multiple axes, and I'm very glad for it. I hope, and kind of suspect, that this will become ever more the case as Geminispace continues to grow - which I also hope and suspect that it will.