Small time

The influx of people joining Mastodon after Musk's takeover of Twitter has started me thinking about the small web and reminded me that I'd let this Gemini server go stale. At a conference a couple of weeks ago I was throwing together a page full of links to go along with a presentation - everyone was putting QR codes at the end of their slides and I thought I should do one too - and it occurred to me that what I was doing wasn't that different to setting up a Gemini server.

From one point of view, HTTP and HTML are very mainstream, and gemini is very niche: but if you're not technical, or haven't spent a couple of decades working with the web, a self-hosted website is just as obscure and odd as a gemini capsule.

One of the things I like about Mastodon is that it's small: if you get twenty boosts it's a big deal. I don't think that it's going to replace Twitter because that's not how these things work, but I hope that some of the new arrivals stick around.

And Mastodon is more complicated than Twitter. People like to gloss over its complexity by saying that it's like email, but I think this overestimates the extent to which people understand email. And people, by and large, have been forced to understand email, by their employers and educational institutions. No-one's doing that with Mastodon.

My talk was about bridging the gap between people who self-identify as programmers and people who don't, but who are still good at using computers, which feels like a different perspective on the same divide. Paradoxically, now that I'm in a role where my technical skills feel like they're getting much more use, I'm becoming interested in bridging this divide.

Real Programmers Don't Write Research Software