Gems
I've been thinking a lot about Gemini. It has been a slow burn over time. People I respect on the web are experimenting with it, and lately I ran across this post from Alex Flounder, “Gemini is Useless”. Here's a gem (no pun intended) from that post:
Gemini's obscurity and lack of utility means that there are no analytics, no metrics, no ways to go viral, to monetize people's attention, build a career or even a minimally-functional web platform. No sane business would build on top of Gemini, and that is exactly why it is capable of having the character that it does. It is a “resistance-in-place” to the existing web, the attention economy and surveillance capitalism. While the existing web becomes increasingly centralized and commercialized, Gemini will remain as it is, frustrating anyone trying to extract value out of it.
Gemini can only serve this role by virtue of its simplicity and austerity. Once it is formalized, it won't add any new features. This may annoy users, who are used to a constantly developing and “improving” web, but its lack of new features provides are what allows it to be a genuinely different space online, one that challenges not just our attachment to specific platforms, but our basic relationship with the modern web and technology itself.
This ethos is intoxicating, enough to make you want to tinker with setting up a server to get something up somehow. I'm intrigued to add Gemini into the goulash of the decentralized web. Imagine a blog that is on Gemini and is broadcasted through Activity Pub yet also has an IPFS address. Reminds me of what Darius Kazemi wrote about on the Dat Blog when emphasizing that it's about choosing one decentralized protocol to solve our current problems with the web but weaving many together into a complex tapestry:
Instead of trying to make a “kitchen sink” protocol that solves a wide variety of problems, we should acknowledge the limitations of our protocols (and our own resources) and instead support and foster interoperability and collaboration between our communities.
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The internet has always been built on a bunch of different technologies filling in the gaps for each other. For example, while web browsers mainly use the TCP protocol for loading web pages, they switch to using UDP when it's convenient for things like video chat. Decentralized web protocols should be no exception to this pattern. The only way we're going to make the internet better is by working together to help each other.