💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › cy_gu › 1638486916.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 14:25:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
During my continuous exploration of the Gemini community, I still haven't found any particular topics and posts that either match my original interests or spark my new curiosities. But I have gradually understood what a decentralized community means to the whole Gemini ecology. Even in terms of the Gemini community, it cannot be easily taken as a whole. The Gemini ecology works like Mastodon that our class has examined before as there are multiple servers on which Gemini users have to register accounts on respectively. From my perspective, there are several advantages of the Gemini community as a decentralized online platform: first, since it is decentralized, one’s activities in different servers are independent of each other, and this feature makes it hard for advertisers to track one’s traces for personalized marketing. Also, as an antithesis to the traditional commercial Internet, the decentralized nature of the Gemini ecology makes it hard to be monopolized by corporate interests and a few powerful actors, such as popular content creators and influencers. In short, the decentralized Gemini ecology makes it autonomous by average users instead of corporations. However, there is a big problem with decentralization in the Gemini community. Unlike Mastodon in which every community has a particular interest or topic, many Gemini communities do not have specific topics for members to engage with. Rather, they only declare to be democratic spaces, which is oversimplified and too general in my opinion. Many Gemini members may have a hard time deciding which servers to join as they are overtly similar, and it is troublesome to maintain too many accounts on different servers and produce the same content.