💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2022 › 202206 › 20220628-gemini-as-a-good.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:44:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-07-16)
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A few years ago, I saw a video on YouTube giving a critical review of the video game "Sea of Thieves". I hadn't seen anything about the game since then, so I looked it up on Wikipedia today. The article mentions that the developers of the game envisioned it to be a "game as a service". Many modern games have already adopted the same revenue model.
It's not a trend we see only in video games. A lot of proprietary software now uses subscriptions, such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office 365. This allows companies to generate income from products the entire time it's being run by the end user, rather than generating income only once at time of initial sale.
In recent years, we've seen many parts of the economy transition from the sale of goods to the sale of services. This allows corporate interests to retain the benefits of actual ownership--thereby increasing their wealth--while giving them greater control over how consumers interact with their products, as the only thing the consumer purchases is the right to access them. It's a trend people need to fight against if they want to decrease wealth inequality.
Interestingly, this goods-to-services transition has spread all the way to the base protocols and technologies that drive the Internet. Gone are the days when a Web page would simply deliver text, images or files to one's browser and call it a day. The proliferation of JavaScript, APIs, streaming protocols, and other real-time content delivery tools means means that end users must rely on a constant connection and up-to-date data from remote servers to be able to access content at all. Even many messaging platforms like Facebook and Discord have become "communication as a service", in some cases blocking users from even being able to see previous messages if their clients are offline.
One reason why I like Gemini is that Gemini reverses this trend. The Gemini transaction accepts exactly one request from a client to a server and sends exactly one response header and one response body from the server to the client. The connection is closed after that one response, meaning a new connection is required to get data again. Once sent, the static data of the response body is now present on the client's machine--no updates or connection checks needed.
Some people in Geminispace see this rigidity, especially the need to open a new connection each time, as a downside. I see things differently. Gemini embodies a very simple, very user-friendly model of transaction: you want some data, you get that data, no frills added and no questions asked. Once the user has the data, he is free to do what he wishes with it. In a way, he now "owns" that data, in the same why someone can own a music CD or a movie on DVD. and with caching, he can own as much data as he wants.
As the proliferation of services on Gemini has shown, one really doesn't need more than a simple transaction like this to provide all kinds of online services. From weather forecasts to news aggregators to Web proxies to social media, Gemini can still do much of what the modern Web can do, but it does it in a way that gives agency back to the users.
I'd like to see more people use Gemini for many reasons, but one major reason is to take power away from Web services that aim to control its users. The spirit of open use and democratic communication is strong in Gemini, down to its very fundamentals. I want to see that spread more widely.
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[Last updated: 2022-06-28]