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I've been following some threads in Geminispace around the generations we see here - exactly who is it that makes up most of Geminispace, anyway?
Over at idiomdrottning, sandra posits that those who can see "the rot under the surface" are those who came of age at a relatively narrow band of time, who edited config.sys and autoexec.bat, who wrote HTML by hand, and who generally prefer to have an understanding and control in how the computer works, so to speak.
Among their generation, and older, sandra argues, are those who always wanted to get into those computer things but for whom it was always too complicated. And younger is the generation who grew up on smartphones and social media and an always-on online world. For whom it's difficult to envision anything other than what the've always experienced. You may as well ask, sandra argues, what a fish thinks of water.
It's a good argument. It seems to explain part of what we see. I think there's some truth to it, and I think it allows an explanation for people, like me, for whom it's true. But elsewhere I'm finding lots of people in geminispace who skew younger, who are living out their lives online the same way I did when I was their age now. And it's hard for me to express how much I love this. That people are still going online and living and oversharing their lives in semi-anonymity, and that there are now lots of options available if you have a computer and some time: the web. Gemini. gopher.
I haven't been optimistic in a while. But if people are shaping their online experiences to what they want them to be, rather than what benefits the owners of a particular platform, I'd say we're slowly getting back to something better.