💾 Archived View for bjornwestergard.com › log › 2022-01-29-smallweb.gmi captured on 2022-06-03 at 22:56:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In what respect is the "small web" small?
Well, the gemini specification is quite brief. It's not difficult to understand if, like me and seemingly most gemini enthusiasts, you have experience writing software.
And the number of people using this protocol is miniscule. Perhaps a few hundred as of this writing.
But what the "small" in "small web" evokes most consistently for me is a certain humility, a recognition that human appetitites, capacities, and time are limited.
To strip the experience of authoring and reading hypertext down to its essential elements - plain text and links - and not even allow admixture of the two within a line, is to acknowledge those limitations.
Human beings are not terribly difficult to manipulate. Self-mastery is hard won and fragile. People who spend a lot of time on the big web complain of a loss of control over their time and attention (and sometimes, their money and inter-personal relationships as well).
A protocol like gemini is an agreement to respect one another's limitations.