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Lo, I have returned.

stern stern at tilde.club

Mon Oct 25 23:20:50 BST 2021

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On 10/25/2021 12:08 PM, Solderpunk wrote:

Geminauts!

Lo, I have returned.

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

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