Acclimating New Gemini Users

2022-01-11

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Wolf Tivy made a post on Station several hours ago^, which led to some spirited discussion about the nature of Geminispace. Wolf lamented that Gemini seemed to be slow everywhere, and the "good energy" seemed to be absent. I can't speak for Wolf's experiences with the protocol, so I won't comment on that part of the discussion, but it made me think about the experience of new Gemini users in general.

The mainline Internet is geared to drive clicks and swipes from viewers, enabling companies to track and monetize them as much as possible. To this end, the big sites like Reddit, YouTube and Facebook fling as much content as possible onto one's screen. One's Facebook timeline will be filled with an endless stream (literally using a design called "infinite scrolling") of posts and links--and if one refreshes the timeline 20 minutes later, all the content will be different. The mainline Internet is fast, bright, colorful, loud, and attention-grabbing.

Geminispace intentionally rejects this paradigm, and the structure of the Gemini protocol is designed to hinder its ability to be built again. Content cannot be pushed to end users at all: users must actively subscribe to feeds to get new posts and links. There are no embedded images, so flashy colors and huge advertisements can't dominate the browser screen. There are no in-line links or Javascript either--Gemini doesn't even support the concept of a cookie, relying instead on user certificates for authentication purposes.

Gemini users tend to be attracted to the protocol precisely because of this deliberate slowness and lack of disruption. The difficulty, however, is that while many mainline Internet users also don't like the intrusiveness of modern Web design, the Internet has slowly acclimated them to this paradigm, so most people are accustomed to it.

As a result, switching to Gemini can be quite a culture shock, and in some ways an uncomfortable exercise in sensory deprivation. Capsules like Station and Antenna, which as far as I'm aware are some of the more popular capsules in Geminispace, receive perhaps a dozen posts a day at their busiest. A new Gemini user, used to sites like Twitter that receive millions of new posts per day, might scoff at the idea that the most popular aggregators see only a handful of new posts per day instead. To such users, Gemini would not seem like a vibrant and growing community--it would more closely resemble a failed, stagnant project on the verge of complete collapse.

Those who have been using Gemini for longer know this isn't the case. Gemini has been growing in popularity over the last year, and there's more to see and do over the protocol than ever. Gemini is now probably the liveliest it's ever been, and it continues to grow each day. But new users who compare Gemini's level of activity to the mainline Internet's level of activity would come to a very different conclusion.

I, probably like many of my readers, am very excited about Gemini, and I'd like to introduce more of my friends and acquaintances to it. But I need to make sure I put things in context and have a proper perspective on the space. Gemini is not as busy as the big tech sites. There's less content to read, and that content is not engineered to activate one's dopamine receptors. New users need to understand the different ethos of Geminispace, and if they're simply not interested in a slower, calmer place like this, no-one should try to force them.

In terms of sharing this world with new users, I think a good approach would be to simply talk candidly about the nature of Gemini. It's a small, slow place. It's designed to simply serve documents and other data, with some tools built to do things like talk to other users and play games. It's meant to be calm, quiet, thoughtful, and unobtrusive. If that sounds good to potential users, then we can help them get involved. And if not, that's fine too.

^ wolftivy

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[Last updated: 2022-01-11]