💾 Archived View for auragem.letz.dev › devlog › 20240325_2.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:26:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I am fully aware of this post someone wrote in response to my leaving Gemini:
I recently saw a post (all links below) of someone who said he was quitting Gemini, due to its liberal bias. I wanted to weigh in a bit, because I've seen this argument before, that Gemini is liberal, and people cannot be heard due to censorship.
Aggregators, Search Engines, the Early Web, and Gemini
This post worries me. It worries me because its very first paragraph (quoted above) misrepresents what I said in the post I wrote that they linked to. It worries me that someone read the below paragraphs from my post as "Gemini has a liberal bias, so I'm quitting":
A word of urgency: Exclusivist mentality was common in Gopherspace, and it's still common in Geminispace, although perhaps slightly less so. The Badges of Shame are inexcusable. The centralization of aggregators is worrying, especially when censorship becomes involved:
Not because people don't have a right to control what gets on their feeds, but because there are not enough feeds to begin with, so a small group of people have greater control over people's access. Search Engines like Kennedy, TLGS, and AuraGem Search (formerly Ponix Search) solved this, but some of these people opposed search engines. The exclusivist mindset of the community is a clear outgrowth of the culture that was set from the first peoples that moved from Gopherspace over to Geminispace. The common sentiment was that difficulty in writing and uploading documents to Gopherspace/Geminispace is a bonus because it excludes non-techy people - implying that non-techy people can't provide valuable information. This mindset is the worst of them all.
It worries me even more that they seem to think that my pushing back on a right-wing talking point about Israel presumably made me anti-liberal, when I am in fact liberal. My mention of Dorothy Day, a very left-leaning Catholic, should have made that sufficiently clear.
If you want to know more about those Catholics that are liberal, just look at the Pew Research Center results:
Party affiliation among Catholics
Like Americans overall, U.S. Catholics are sharply divided by party
And here's results on 50% of all LGBTQ+ individuals in the US being religious:
Religiosity Among LGBT Adults In the US (Williams Institute, 2020)
What worries me most is that they hyper-focused on the censorship part, when my focus was on exclusivity and over-centralization, as evidenced by the very paragraph I wrote just after I linked to a censorship post by Christopher Howard:
Not because people don't have a right to control what gets on their feeds, but because there are not enough feeds to begin with, so a small group of people have greater control over people's access. Search Engines like Kennedy, TLGS, and AuraGem Search (formerly Ponix Search) solved this, but some of these people opposed search engines.
In case it wasn't clear - I am gay, I *am* a liberal, I believe in the right to *choose* to have an abortion because philosophical and religious questions have not been sufficiently answered, I believe in religious pluralism and one's ability to not have a religion, and yes, Separation of Church and State, which is in fact a *religious doctrine*, I believe in government assistance programs, and the ideals of actual real feminism and equality and egalitarianism and equity, much of which is rooted in a lot of religions, and I can be all of these things while being religious *and* supporting *both* Muslims and Jews, and *still* critique geminispace in the way that I have, because my critique was never about it being liberal-leaning in the first place. Regardless, I should not have had to say any of that, because people shouldn't be making stuff up about other people.
I do not think Gemini is liberal-only or very liberal (in fact, one might think at first glance it leans farther left in some spaces than just liberal), but I literally don't care, because **those weren't any of the reasons I listed for why I was leaving Gemini.** My reasons were the following:
I also warned against cultish behaviors and beliefs and centralization of aggregators. This centralization is something I wanted to help prevent, which provided the very reason for why I open-sourced my Search Engine and why I wrote a follow-up post about why I intend to keep AuraGem running and finish off some parts of my Search Engine:
2024-03-09 But Wait, AuraGem is Still Up?
Regardless, I do wish Geminispace well, but I am not the only one that has commented on Gemini's exclusivistic and haughty mindset, and the post I am responding to here directly references the type of mindset I am talking about:
Gemini is small, kind of like the web in 1995. You can share your content with each other just by telling people it is out there. No search engine, no aggregator needed. On this gemlog, I send the transmissions to Antenna when I post, but that is just to share my work if people might be interested. I don't know if anyone visits my capsule from Antenna (Gemini is often quiet that way).
For my friends and family, who don't have their own capsules and don't check Antenna or Capcom or any other Aggregators, I just send them an email and say "check this out". You can also create gemrings on your capsule, or check the gemrings on the capsules you like, and add their feeds to your Gemini browser (Amfora, Lagrange, whatever), and read the new content as it comes in.
Word-of-mouth only gets you so far. Either you want your space to be useful and able to be explored, or you don't. Aggregators and Search Engines are not the problem, its the over-centralization, and restricting yourself from using them isn't some skill you should be proud of or gloat about. And yet that's how many subspaces within Gemini used to act. The more hardcore, the more restricted you were, the more status you had. Let's just be totally honest here - this very obviously comes from a Linux and Unix mindset, and it was a mindset in Gopherspace 4 years ago before Gemini even existed. I know because *I was there.*
I *do not* want to go back to the web in 1995. I want to bring an internet of rigorous scientific papers and intellectualism, *and* deep spiritual fulfilment, to contemporary times. That was not 1995. 1995 was a bunch of crappy people on BBSs and Newsgroups being rude to others and forming exclusive cliques where they talked down about normal people as if they were somehow superior. I have started my new protocol in hopes of detracting these sorts of people, because I do not want my spaces to become like the 1995 web. Sorry. Tech-bros are not welcome here.
Computing should not be gloating about how hardcore and restrictive you can make things. **It should be about doing the most with what you have.** And that's an important difference: the power-to-weight ratio. Gemini did not take this power-to-weight ratio into account in all of its design, and not all of the community latched onto the idea. If you want to read more on that, you can read my series critiquing Gopher and Gemini's designs in the following posts:
2024-03-22 Gopher's Uncontextualized Directories vs. Gemini's Contextualized Directories
2024-03-23 What Gemini Gets Wrong With Anti-Extensibility
2024-03-24 The Necessary Semantics behind Emphasis and Strong
2024-03-25 The Simplicity of List Nesting: How AsciiDoc Does It
Gemini is the content. And, thank goodness, the content is not from corporations, but individuals, one of the main reasons I love Gemini.
I will finish on this: Content by individuals does not automatically make it good content, or useful, or worthwhile. What matters is the content itself, **not** who it was made/written by! Who cares if Google wrote the documentation to Golang's Standard Library if that documentation is excellent?! Why are we putting so much stock into *who* the author is and no stock into the actual content?
This has prompted me to add another warning to Geminispace: be careful about dehumanizing people. Those who work for corporations are still human beings with real thoughts and feelings and ideas. Corporations don't write documentation or content - humans do. Most importantly, the ideas and the content matters, not necessarily who writes it.