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I am excited and delighted to announce that I have just published some extensive updates to the official Project Gemini FAQ!
This is the first update to the FAQ in over two years, and I'm retrospectively ashamed and embarrassed that it was left in the state that it was for as long as it was. There was nothing terribly wrong with the answers which were in the old FAQ, and in fact a lot of those answers are still there with no or minimal changes. The problem was with its incompleteness and inaccessibility. The FAQ, and indeed the entire gemini.circumlunar.space capsule, have evolved piecemeal over the years from content prepared in the earliest days of the project, when the audience for official information was a lot smaller and a lot less varied. They've been tweaked and expanded as interest in the project has grown, but never extensively reworked to address the fact that this audience has grown a lot and changed a lot. Not everybody who hears about Gemini today has used Gopher before - most of them have never heard of it. Introducing Gemini to these folks from the beginning as "something between Gopher and the web" is meaningless. An FAQ where the section entitled "Protocol design" comes before, and is longer than, the section entitled "Getting started in Geminispace" is not welcoming.
The new FAQ is, by word count, more than three times larger than it used to be! It's divided into seven sections, not four, and most of those sections are internally structured with subsections. The longest section is now "Getting started in Geminispace", which comes well before the "Protocol design" section, and it comes after an "Introduction and overview" section which almost as long as "Protocol design". It doesn't assume familiarity with Gopher from the get go, and it doesn't assume a strong preference for minimalist software just for the sake of minimalist software. It is, I feel, much, much improved.
I don't conceptualise the work I put into rewriting the FAQ as marketing or promotion or anything like that, and I didn't put so much time on it in an effort to grow Geminispace. I do very much want to see Geminispace continue to grow and to flourish, but I'm not interested at all in growth for the sake of growth, or rapid growth driven by hype, or trying too hard to convert people to the cause. I think slow, sustainable, organic growth driven by word of mouth amongst people who are already receptive to the idea of something like Gemini, and don't need convincing so much as to know that it's there in the first place, is fine and dandy. I believe there are plenty of those people out there! I'm not interested in changing what Gemini is in order to make it appeal to more people than it already might. But I am interested in making sure that when people to whom it might appeal hear about it on the grapevine and decide to learn more from the horse's mouth, they find an explanation which actually makes it clear that Gemini is up their alley, even if they're not a burnt out web developer or a suckless.org fanatic. That's what these changes are about.
Somehow, astonishingly, this is, I think, the first time I have really tried hard to put into words, in an official capacity, not what Gemini is, at the level of requests and responses and codes and bytes and bla, bla, bla, but what it is about. The spirit of the thing, its ethos, its values. Not just a list of things we don't like (cookies, pop-ups, autoplay), but some idea of what we do like. Geminauts often complain that some of the criticisms of our little world come from people who are "missing the point". It's true that sometimes it's very obvious critics haven't made much effort to understand "the point" of Gemini. But it's also true that "the point" has been mostly implicit in all the official documentation all these years. As long as that's true, we can't put all of the blame on the folks who missed it, so I've tried better to elucidate the point. It won't help the folks who don't even bother to read the FAQ, but oh well.
I've done this with some degree of trepidation. I feel comfortable writing with authority about the technical aspects of Gemini or making decrees about how I'm going to run the official server. But in the new FAQ I am single-handedly writing on behalf of a large community, one that is precious to me, and trying to explain its values to the world at large. That's heavy! I have tried very hard not to prescribe some kind of "correct mentality" that a good Geminaut is supposed to have. I don't want to establish any kind of "orthodoxy" in content or behaviour, or to put words into anybody's mouths, or to shame or condescend to those Geminauts who also enjoy using social media apps on their smartphones. I have tried not to present us as retro nostalgics out of step with the times, nor as monastic ascetics who enjoy depriving themselves of things, nor as radical activists trying to burn down the web. Instead, I've presented us as perfectly reasonable people who just want to be left alone to read in quiet, and to enjoy exploring the wonders of a rich but calm online space that we're building by ourselves, for ourselves. This isn't some kind of smokescreen to make us look better in the public eye. The status quo online makes it easy to slip into revolutionary fervour, but I sincerely believe that wishing for something like Gemini to exist is the most reasonable thing in the world. Some people will laugh at me for that. Let them. I insist there's not one single crazy thing about wishing that the internet took more cues from libraries than from shopping malls or casinos.
I hope this new presentation of the project is well received. I, for one, am really happy with it, but I'm also certain that the new FAQ is not perfect. I am open to feedback from the community. If there is something in there that you really love or that you really hate, or just something that you think is factually inaccurate and ought to be changed, email me. If there's clear consensus from a lot of folks that I've made missteps, I'll try to correct them.
If I've mentioned you by name in the new FAQ, or mentioned one of your projects, or linked to one of your projects or your servers, and you wish I hadn't, let me know and I'll take it right down. I sent a lot of emails asking a lot of people for permission to do a lot of this, but if I missed you, or forgot I was waiting to hear back, or you just changed your mind, no problem, reach out.
If I haven't mentioned you by name or mentioned or linked to one of your projects and you feel really deeply wronged by this, well, reach out then too if you must, but please try to understand that I deliberately haven't aimed at providing an exhaustive list of anything in the FAQ. I don't want to overwhelm newcomers with long lists of options and induce analysis paralysis. I don't want to have to update the FAQ every week when a new client gets written or a new server goes offline, I don't want broken links to pile up if the FAQ isn't updated for a little while (although I hope it'll never go two years without some attention again!). I've tried to link to some of the most well-known and salient stars in our constellation for the benefit of newcomers, things which have been around for a while and which I expect to stay around for a while. I understand that this has the appearance of dividing clients, hosts, communities, etc. into "officially deemed important" and "officially deemed safe to to ignore". Please believe that I hate this! I can only imagine how it must feel to put work and love into something and have it fall on the wrong side of this divide. In my ideal future, the importance that the official Project Gemini capsule plays in deciding where newcomers go will constantly decrease. You can't read about Firefox vs Chrome or GoDaddy vs Bluehost at https://w3c.org, and Gemini shouldn't be any different, but obviously we're not there yet. I do acknowledge that there are people in the community trying to help with this, and I'm grateful. There will be more direct linking from the official capsule to community resources in the near future. I'm coordinating with people on this point.
Almost finally, I've updated the homepage of the capsule as well. It was perhaps even more embarrassingly out of date than the FAQ, with lots of links to dead services. It's cleaner now, the links to community resources having been mostly moved to the FAQ. It features a new 100 word (not one more or less!) introduction to Gemini that I'm pleased with and proud of. It complements the new FAQ very nicely.
Actually finally (at last!), I want everybody to know that this is just the beginning! I'm not even done with the FAQ yet. I want to rework the "Protocol design" section a little as well. Updating that was less urgent than everything else I've done so far, but I still consider it important. I just wanted to publish what I've done so far and take a little break. Because of this, and because the new FAQ content might get tweaked in response to feedback, I would ask anybody who is thinking of taking on the huge task of updating the now quite out of date translations to kindly wait until, say, August before starting, just so you don't make more work for yourself (it's enough of an undertaking as it is!). It's not just the FAQ which is going to see more work. I plan to spend the rest of the summer expanding and polishing the official capsule. I won't be working on it alone. I have already started reaching out to people in the Gemini community to invite them to write content for the capsule sharing their experience and expertise with various things. It's going to be great! Please look forward to it.