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Good commentary on likes, comments, backlinks, and centralization:
Likes are pure poison. Human minds seems to be universally open to a complete addiction to things like that. I understand the mechanism, but can't help but feel the pull: how many likes did I get today? What can I write to get more? I hope we avoid gamifying Gemini.
Hypertext is a great tool. Linking across sites is cool. As szczezuja points out, backlinking allows a way to comment without commenting - if you are thinking about something you've read and feel strong enough to write somenthing, backlinking allows the eventual reader to chain back to the original document that caused you to think that. It is a tool.
Too much of that is like-like. Will my post start a heated discussion? Am I voicing a strong opinion of mine or am I a troll?
Upon seeing a response post to something I posted, especially one that completely mangles my message, my immediate reaction is to post a response to that. Is that what I want to do with my time?
I think I was more productive when I was shouting into the vacuum, instead of competitive editorializing.
@bacardi55 has a tool called gtl that allows you to aggregate interleaved tinylogs from your choice of sites. This short-form interaction is better than say spending a daily blogpost debunking some idea or clearing up misunderstandings resulting from a previous post. And you run it locally, collecting posts from sites you choose.
There is a lot to be done to make such interaction more useful and usable - perhaps tagging so you don't see all the noise. Perhaps a tag taxonomy, so you can pick a branch of a discussion that you are interested in, including sub-branches.
I am always looking out for that. If social back-and-forth is what we desire, we can do that without a central platform.
As a reminder, gemini.circumlunar.space went down for several days. I could not look at the protocol spec. How dependent are we on a single server?
Centralization has two sides: we can aggregate and cache content to prevent individual sites disappearing and taking content with them. On the other hand, we then depend on such sites.