Here’s where I’m at on this.
Forums and silo communities like Station and Geddit are bad.
Aggregators like CAPCOM, Spacewalk, Comitium, Antenna, GTL, Cosmos and others are really really good. I love them and want to endorse them. They really help Gemini.
Some of the silo communities like Midnight and Bubble have some amount of interoperability with the larger Gemini world. They let you host more-or-less normal capsules with stuff that’s more-or-less compatible with gmisubs and tinylogs but that have extra bolted-on features like intracommunity comment systems. I’m leaning on putting that idea in the bad category as a whole. (Multi-capsule hosting sites that makes it easy for people to make capsules, perhaps through a WWW or Titan interface even, I love that and Gemini needs that and that’s not the problem at all and please keep it up, you’re doing great work! The problem is only the “local, logged-in commenters only” section because that creates silo sites.)
Not that all web forums are inherently bad, niche forums have always been around on the web and usenet, but they become bad when they become general social media sites like Facebook.
I love how Antenna’s own output is itself a gemsub that also works with other aggregators and feedreaders because that makes it possible to also, on a reader-local level, add in extra feeds from people who aren’t on Antenna.
Now, are these aggregators a form of centralization? Yes! And as the Gemini space grows there’s room for decentralized versions like Shannon or Schapcom. Gemini still feels small enough that those are pretty much pointless compared to just every reader curating their own list of feeds to read.
And also there’s still an implementation gap here. It’s easy to fall into the habit of “only reading Antenna” and neglecting your other feeds without feedreaders that aggregate and deduplicate Antenna and the other feeds for you, locally. This is gonna get especially important as the original Antenna instance gets replaced by several others. “Antenna arrays” i.e. sites that lets you combine Antenna instances upstream, I think that’s a good idea actually because it can decrease the overall amount of traffic compared to every single user having to pull a bunch of Antenna traffic from all over the place and recombine on their own.
Also there’s another issue with this upcoming Antenna transition that I feel has been underdiscussed and that’s censorship.
I don’t want to see Gemini devolve into some 4chan freezepeach bullshit. Ew0k has only blocked like three feeds or so across the history of Antenna but wow they were nasty.
Lars the bear has some questions and comments:
So far as I can see, the folks worrying about centralization aren’t particularly concerned about search engines like TLGS, which are provided under similar terms. Rather, they seem to worry more about social media-like services, that have the potential to become “like Facebook”.
Yeah, I don’t use search engines on Gemini so I don’t care about them but even so they don’t have the main issue which is vendor lock-in!
In the end, either Gemini is proof against the horrors of the mainstream web, or it isn’t.
It isn’t. That’s why we are so careful with it and prioritize sustainable, non–lock-in ways of using it.
For example, I’ve endorsed and interacted with Tootik, Atom, gmisub, tinylog, and aggregators. I think they’re all great.
Things aren’t automatically good just because they’re on Gemini. “Gem-washing”.
Now, all these sites are non-commercial, non-profit, just-for-fun labors of love. I understand that. So was Cohost. Don’t overstate my accusation here. I’m not assigning ulterior motives of greed or exploitation. These folks are just building something that they think is going to be cool and make things happy. I understand that.
But the way they’re going about it is heading down a mired direction that we can’t easily untangle from.
We shouldn’t shirk from using Gemini in ways that look a tiny, tiny bit like a massively shrunken Facebook.
I see it the other way around: because Gemini is so good, and I love it so much, I am more wary of joining a centralized forum on Gemini than I’d be of joining a forum here on the web. I’m been really happy keeping my Gemini experience “Facebook”-free. The li’l aggregator/gemlog community brings me joy every day. I’m more than satisfied with it.
I’m more worried about Gemini fading away, because it doesn’t offer anything that people actually want.
This is so exhausting: I spent the 00s tilting at the Facebook windmill, refusing to join it which ended up wrecking my life as all my friends moved onto there to organize their “events”. It definitively “offered something people wanted”. 🤦🏻♀️ Or thought they wanted.
I don’t want to go through all that again.
Gemini can stay good if we avoid making the mistakes the web made. It is absolutely not immune from those mistakes.
In the IndieWeb world, the proposed solution to this problem is syndication. By all means use mainstream social media sites, IndieWeb supporters say, but retain control of your own content.
By now it should be clear that POSSE and PESOS were really bad ideas.
Syndication works – and I think is almost universal – in the Gemini world, too. People might use Antenna, for example, to notify the community that they’ve published something, but they aren’t publishing on Antenna. They’re still controlling their own content.
If Antenna is what you’re freaking out about then you didn’t read my essay properly; your call-out is incredibly misapplied since I love Antenna and said as much in my original text. BBS/Bubble and Station is what I’m not joining.
Facebook and its ilk aren’t bad because millions of people use them. They aren’t even bad because their users can’t easily move away.
They’re bad because they’re bad. They’d still be bad if they had only three hundred users.
I disagree completely with all four of those sentences.
Instead:
I don’t appreciate getting stuck in a “is not!”/”is too!”/”is not!”/”is too!” loop but I put forth actual arguments for my statemenst when I first made them and I did so now, too. Even though it should be pretty obvious to all that the Death Star wouldn’t be a good thing even with Luke and Leia steering the helm.