💾 Archived View for gmi.bacardi55.io › gemlog › 2023 › 05 › 18 › reflexion-about-bubble-part-2 captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:47:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted on 2023-05-18
It seems my previous post wasn't as poorly received as I thought it would be (at least yet ^^), which is great and show the open mind of most geminauts. I've read a lot of different reactions to it, on the fediverse, via email, on other gemlog or on bubble itself, as there is a [dedicated page about it] in the discuss subspace!
There were many different remarks / ideas / feelings / … expressed, all of them interesting. It made me think a bit further about the situation and while I'm still unsure about a lot of things, I thought it would help me put my current thinking "on paper" (aka a gemlog entry^^). I'm going to quote many different users from different systems, but I want to start by saying this: I don't think anyone is either right or wrong about this topic, it is mainly a mater of preferences / philosophy and what people are after. Thanks to all that participate to the discussion so far, I think Morgan summarized it the best:
I'm happy to see new things being tried and happy that there is also healthy discussion around whether it's a good idea. -- Morgan gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
So that being said, let's deep dive a bit more. Brave yourself, because I'm not sure yet where I'm going with this post except that I know it's going to be a long one (again^^).
From what I read, most users seems to be after a better "social" experience in Gemini. I'm putting social between quotes because I don't think they are talking about social in the sense of social media on the web, but mainly about the origin of the world of people being able to share stuff in a nice, open and kind place and create links. I understand and agree with that too. We humans are social animals, we like to gather around common interests and want to communicate with others. Heck, that's why we are all here!
And I want this too, I love this kind of situation when we collectively discuss such topic! That's why I thought about [tinylogs] and [gemini mention] in the first place! Trying to find a way to communicate while keeping your own home. This is also why I really appreciate @skyjake adding both gemini feeds and tinylogs format in bubble. That removes one barrier for those who wants to keep their capsule as the "home for all their content".
One thing I wanted to highlight, because it seems people believed my goal was enforcing Federation… Well, not entirely. I prefer to think it is to prevent centralization and allow users to keep ownership of their content. The difference being that to avoid centralization, federation might be a response. But there might be others too! And I thought we had the start of a response already available in the gemini space.
I thought that having tools like Antenna and the tinylog aggregator would allow more discussion and interaction. And to some extent it did. Cosmos made it even better by showing linked posts together so that people could quickly find content from different capsules talking about the same subject. Of course, it is mainly for gemlog entry and thus "long post". To be fair, it shouldn't have been only for long post. One could have a dedicated gemini feed for responses with only short ones. Tinylogs entry could also linked gemlog entry and thus be short responses to long post.
While the above is a first level of interaction, it mandates users to have a home somewhere. One could argue that it is simple to setup, either via selfhosting or by using "managed services" like tilde or any capsules hosting services. IMHO, this should be the way to go. But it is easy for me to say, as I know (more or less) how to do all these things. And we shouldn't expect every gemini users to have the same tech background.
But is it that easier to manage a client certificate to create a bubble account compare to setting up an account on a manage services like tilde.cafe, flounder.online, or any others? I shouldn't respond myself, because I'm not the target audience of these services and my vision is not objective. Someone with really limited technical knowledge should respond to that.
Lori wrote:
the difference between the wider web and gemini space is that a large percentage of the people posting in a place like this DO have their own places and their own blogs and whatnot. -- lori gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
I would argue that this is true now, because bubble has just been created. One could think that with bubble, the "/u" might push users to avoid creating their gemlog. It that a bad thing? Not necessarily because it is a facilitator like any tilde service… It just put a lot of eggs in the same basket. About that, I read this on skyjake gemlog:
Also, I want to be very clear: I am not interested in holding anyone's data hostage at Geminispace.org. -- skyjake gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2023-05_bubble-and-gs-org.gmi
And I wanted to clarify that I knew that already. I'm not saying skyjake wants to be the GAFAM of gemini (for what purpose anyway?), but was more thinking about the philosophy and a reality that my life experience has put in my head for a long time now: always think about the bus factor. Don't get me wrong, I wish only the best to skyjake and all of you, but my life has made this a key point in any reflection I have. Exporting your own content is fine. But your comments are more or less useless outside the overall discussions.
Although, I disagree with ModdeBear when they wrote:
Gemini is small and simple enough where the community can really easily create and move to new services if the need comes up. -- moddedBear gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
Yes, a user can export their date from bubble, but no it wouldn't be easy to migrate to another service. Even if that service is another bubble instance. But please prove me wrong :).
It is important as well to recognize the truth: looking at the level of interaction on geminispace.org right now is an obvious first response. I have indeed never seen that many people engaged in so many topics at the same time. Granted it is a new services and thus many people are trying it as the "new cool thing", there are more discussion and exchange than on [station], [Geddit] and [tinylogs] all together. It does show that something was somewhat missing.
The discussion on bubble about my previous post has 23 comments on it, while only 3 users responded via a gemlog entry ([dimkr], [Satch] and funny enough, [Skyjake] himself), all the other use the comments system built in bubble. And I'm sure that if bubble didn't have comments, maybe one or 2 others people would have join the conversation, not everyone engaged right now.
So that's the reality, geminauts wants more interaction, and bubble provide a simpler way to achieve this! Which is great! I wish we could find a less centralized way (read below), but anything that improves the gemini space is welcome. I believe this space should be more a democracy than dictated by one person, would that be solderpunk himself.
Kelbot wrote on the Fediverse:
It feels like a different mode of communication altogether to me though. Just like making short posts on the fediverse feels totally different than making a blog post. I see it as more likely that people join in geminispace.org (or a different bubble instance) as a way of interacting more directly with each other in addition to having their own capsule/gemlog. -- Kelbot
And I think eph summarized this the best with a nice image:
[…]every good human endeavor needs a few gathering places. tl;dr houses : personal capsules :: public squares : {Antenna, Station, Bubble, […]} -- eph gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
Maybe they are right, maybe we should just think about this space as "common place".
Gemini feeds and tinylog format. I don't think it needs more explanation, as this is the key for external user to still "follow" user content. I think that it is very important for people who does not want to only use bubble.
I like the reddit like (sub)spaces so that different topic can be classified and discussed at the same time. It brings more than what geddit can do. It is easy to follow (sub)spaces and thus only follow/read what you might be interested in. Having gemini feeds for (sub)spaces makes it potentially easy to add them to your aggregator of choice like [comitium]. When I have a bit more time later this week or next, I'm going to add some (sub)spaces to my selfhosted aggregator.
The "/u" space is both something I like and don't like. On the plus side for now, it helps people create easily a gemlog, so it remove a barrier of entry which is great.
On the other side for the "/u" space, I feel like it centralized too much things in one place. One could argue that bubble being open source, anyone can host another managed bubble instance, but going back to my previous post, I think we would almost all agree that you would loose the interaction with other. So the only reason I'd see other instances of bubble would be for "hidden" or "closed" community. Indeed, why creating another bubble for another open community while you could have a dedicated (sub)space on the "big bubble" where all users are already.
Also, one thing I don't like on "traditional" (=web) social media that we can find in bubble is the "gamification": Likes, Sort by hotness, Number of comments displayed, etc… I think these stuff are usually wrong as they create addictions, FOMO and worse. I agree with Dimkr on this:
IMO drugs like "likes", "boosts", counters of followers and popularity scores shouldn't exist in the small net. They encoruage frequent, non-mindful consumption. -- dimkr gemini://hd.206267.xyz/view/801abc5935a89c4d1f6b7b9a82522bd9a2166375d80be5eb87e1565a01e89666
Aside the negative points above, where I think bubble can be improved is by allowing external interaction. What do I mean by this? Well a first level of response was mentioned in my previous post with Federation. But I agree with skyjake around the level of complexity it would requires:
Implementing this kind of a chat via multiple instances is technically possible, just look at ActivityPub. But it's a ton more complicated than what we have here. Tech/apps built on Gemini should IMO be somewhat on the same level of complexity than Gemini itself. -- skyjake gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
It is a bit out of context because in this quote skyjake is talking about a chat app, but federation via a kind of simpler ActivityPub would be overkilled and the level of complexity would mean only a very limited number of users could go that road anyway. So how could we improve interaction? Well, by reusing already existing mechanism in the gemini space.
For comments in particular, I think people should be able to post a link without an account to respond to a post. To avoid spam or other, maybe a specific string should be present in the page (or not) but I would prefer a pushing method like on Antenna than on cosmos for this particular use case. I read somewhere that skyjake said that maybe bubble should subscribe to antenna or cosmos? I think it would be better to let user decide to push themselves their response to a bubble discussion. Why? For 2 reasons:
1/ To allow user to write response on a dedicated url that may not be pushed in their gemlog feed. I would personally prefer not to have a small 5 lines responses being visible in my feed but just used for that particular use case and maybe put them in a specific "bubble" directory and not mix those with longer post. To be fair, it also seems I don't know how to write short answers anyway :D.
2/ It allow users to decide when in a discussion they would push their response (and thus where in the discussion thread their content would be linked). Seems like a detail, but when we talk about discussion, the where the response is placed is important to ensure the right context.
Doing so allow the users to stay owner of their content, decide themselves what and when to push a response to a discussion and still participate to a global discussion. The drawback of this is that it would not push notification to bubble users (at least without bubble parsing the content of the linked post, but there I think it would almost go too far in term of complexity as well).
One limitation of not having a "local" account means not being able to create a (sub)space, but that is a small limitation as it would be easy to create an account just for that if really needed. My point being ownership of content, not not having a account on bubble per say.
As of now, I'm going to create an account on bubble, but I wish my usage of it would be limited to posting the replies wrote on my own capsule (like this one). I wish that at some point, I wouldn't need that account anymore except for creating (sub)spaces and initiating discussion if needed, but that is in the (capable) hands of skyjake.
Outside of bubble, I'll use my already existing comitium instance to subscribe to some (sub)spaces feeds and maybe users feeds/tinylogs is any are using them. One hope I have also with bubble is that people embrace more the tinylog format :).
I think the bigger problem facing gemini is link rot caused by too much decentralization -- moddedBear gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
I don't really agree with this. If a user decide to delete their capsule and remove their content from Gemini, either because they don't enjoy this space anymore or any other reasons, this is their choice. Forcing their content to still be available because they don't know / can't remove them easily is not the right solution. Contents are owned by their author, not the hosting platform. It is sad, but if you really want to keep a content available to yourself at anytime, create your own copy. It is extra easy with gemini thanks to gemtext.
I think community ownership and management could work for “/s/“ forums. I also think the “/u/“ spaces would work better if users could host them as single-user blogs. Tildes could host multi-user instances. -- emilis gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
I think "/s" forums are indeed the key of bubble success right now. I'm less positive about the "/u" because as opposed to what emilis said, hosting them elsewhere would be very complex just to post content, as opposed to already existing solution like gemlog generator or manged services like tildes.
That is indeed the huge downside of centralized services. This drawback is balanced by massive advantages in other areas, though. -- skyjake gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2023-05_bubble-and-gs-org.gmi
I would be *very* careful with this kind of logic, because putting user simplicity as the number one goal above all others is one of the reasons the web is currently what it is (centralized and tracked).
The gemini space is dynamic and very much alive. If bubble did one thing, it is showing that. A few clicks on geminispace.org will show anyone that it is very active. At the pace of the slow web, for sure, but active nonetheless! And that's the key thing for me!
So thanks skyjake for all your hard work improving this space, and thanks to all of you nice people sharing the gemini space together :).
I have my own Tinylog. How do I reply to a message from someone else's Tinylog? I have no idea. I imagine there might be a way, but I haven't figured it out. -- sirwilburthefirst gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
The [RFC] is clear about [responses] though:
[=> linkToOriginalEntry ]RE: @author[@capsule.tld] <Date of the original article>
That would mean that the client also needs a way for me to post messages to my Tinylog. I haven't seen one that does. I currently use some custom code that allows me to add new logs. -- sirwilburthefirst gemini://geminispace.org/s/discuss/289
The client [GTL] that I've built is able to do so. You can define the path to the tinylog file as well as the script to run after editing it. Feel free to reach out via email or the fediverse if you need more help achieving this.