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Lo, I have returned.

Solderpunk solderpunk at posteo.net

Mon Oct 25 20:08:17 BST 2021

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Geminauts!

And I have come not to bring peace, but the sword.

Well, not really. Sorry, couldn't resist a little drama.

But I *have* come with a strong resolve to move things forward quickly, decisively, and if necessary unilaterally. I will be putting the "dictator" in BDFL (but not ignoring the "benevolent").

My thoughts are something like this:

The never ending discussion (and at times heated argument) that has characterised the efforts to collectively and openly finalise the spec using this mailing list, and the associated risk of leader burnout, now feel to me like they are a larger risk/liability to the project than the prospect of making slightly suboptimal and/or unpopular decisions when wrapping things up relatively quickly and without agonising over every little detail. The sooner the spec is finalised the sooner we can spend more of our time and energy reading and writing Geminispace content. People who aren't interested in spending time and energy doing those things have no place playing a strong role in deciding how to finalise things, anyway.

It's clear that any hope of unanimity in the community on exactly what Gemini should look like is long gone. There are too many people coming from too many technical backgrounds for us all to agree on what is necessary and what is extraneous. Anything resembling "design by committee" will likely result in bad compromises leaving everybody unhappy. Better to have decisive leadership with a clear vision. This will leave some unhappy. It's unfortunate, but it's inevitable. Gemini can't be everything to everybody.

Despite my total lack of involvement for several months and the lack of any progress on the spec, Geminispace *itself*, which is our real goal, has neither stagnated nor shrunk. It has only gotten better. Awesome things like smol.pub have turned up. All the time there are more and more people setting up little digital homes in Geminispace, who accept and embrace Gemini as it is right now, and many of them are very happy with the status quo. They are writing truly wonderful content, and I have not come across a single thing written there yet which made me think "right now this is merely good, but it could be excellent if only Gemini supported X, Y or Z". And all of this is hosted on diverse servers and compatible with diverse clients, including clients which have not been updated in months. All of this says we have gotten the most important things right or close enough to right already, and there is no risk of catastrophically messing anything up if we simply resolve outstanding technical issues with the minimum possible change. Additional capacities in the gemtext format are not necessary. That's not just, like, my opinion, man, that's an empirical fact. Geminispace is there. It's *exactly* the kind of space I originally envisaged.

I will start wrapping stuff up, via changes to what have always been the canonical versions of all relevant documents, hosted at gemini.circumlunar.space, as quickly as I can. I am not going to take the time to justify every single decision against all real or imagined objects in long posts to the mailing list or my gemlog. Maybe I will do this retrospectively some day, but for now I just want to get it done. I will act largely alone in this regard, but I'm not going to completely disregard all external input. A lot of people have put a lot of of time and care into thinking and writing about these issues both on this list and in the git trackers that sprung up once I delegated spec finalisation to Sean. I'm going to read that stuff and I'm going to be be guided by it, and I will reach out to individual people for clarification when I feel it necessary. I am genuinely thankful to all of those people for their efforts and I do not intend to be dismissive of them.

If I sound angry and frustrated, I apologise. I mean, to some extent I am, but not at particular people or at the community, I'm angry and frustrated at vague abstract things like human group dynamics and viral internet hype cycles. I continue to care about this project and I care about the community that has formed around it. I acknowledge that I am far from blameless in how this year in Gemini has turned out. I hope the community still has some faith in me, and I hope everyone understands that I'm doing this because I honestly think it's for the best, and not because I want all teh power. I don't want *any* power! But nobody I know and trust enough to give the power to wants it either, and big formal multi-person decision making is not going to yield good or fast results, so, here we are.

I'm not going to have time to do this *and* follow the list closely and reply to any and all questions. But I will make a genuine effort to keep the list informed as I work.

Cheers,Solderpunk