Everybody Has a Take on Bubble. Here’s Mine

It’s short: I don’t have one.

But to have arrived at this non-take, I have had a couple of hot or not so hot takes.

I participated on geminispace.org quite a bit. But my foremost reason to participate was because I agree with @skyjake in dog-fooding Gemini for issue tracking for Lagrange. So I had a snack.

Because I added my email address to geminispace.org, I received notifications. I participated in more subspaces. The slow web got faster. Uneasily faster. But the gained value from staying in the loop had more upside than downside; collaboration increased. Still, there was the lingering feeling that I moved from a cozy zen retreat to the hustle and bustle of a metropolis. All those feelings still apply after a week.

I enjoyed collaborating with people on this centralized instance. But most other services or protocols also have centralized infrastructure, like IRC or mailing lists. And P2P has discovery problems. That’s why I don’t think the centralization aspect is much of a problem, serverwise. My home is my capsule.

But is there going to be a dominance problem? We’ll see. It boils down to a single question: Does Bubble/geminispace.org take anything away from the current Geminispace or does it add to it? Is it net-positive?

From social media we know that microblogging made blogging unattractive. Many people abandoned their blogs, and many didn’t even start one. People are lazy by nature and centralized instances provided an audience. And apps. Reach became more important. This could happen here as well. Or the opposite. People leave, because gemlogging into the Geminispace feels like shouting into a void, the vacuum of space.

Or is this a false dichotomy and both ways can coexist and everybody is happy, because they can find what they need, without bothering the others. Elevated engagement for the right reasons is a net-positive in my opinion.

So I relax and see how I feel about it in a couple of weeks. I can always delete my account on geminispace.org and know, that the data is actually deleted.

But there’s one thing I’m sure about: I won’t use the /u part of geminispace.org to publish anything.