on the internet

I've been experimenting with the gemini protocol and pink over the past few days, and it's been great! Email is preconfigured on pink -- launching alpine was sufficient to get started (I can be reached at soup@tilde.pink :)).

geminispace itself has been a welcome respite from the busy and hypercorporate reality of http. The userbase is quite technical, which is fun to see -- lots of folks dabbling in linux and BSD and writing long-form on everything from setting up technical environments to gardening and how they've been feeling during the long slog of covid.

There's a common type of post on geminispace waxing nostalgic about the old days of the world wide web, before software ate the world and every respectable business had to be wired up to it. Back then tracking was not a ubiquitous part of browsing the web, and "content" was not generated for the sole purpose of making money. I too wish for a return to that type of internet, even if it was slightly before my time.

But I also don't think it could have been otherwise. It is in the nature of capitalism to expand and commodify everything it can. And information -- browsing habits, interests, age group, sexual orientation, political affiliations -- these things are valuable to companies (and the state). Of course they're going to fight their hardest to track users.

That isn't to say that geminispace is doomed. We can be intentional about the digital spaces we construct and contribute to. This applies to what we do in http-land too. But it's important to understand that the internet didn't become the informal knowledge haven we all dream of due to lack of effort on the part of technologists, or because the masses are stupid. The internet failed because it was too valuable to the capitalist.

march 5, 2022