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Cold blanketry

(originally posted in Gopherspace on 2019-06-22)

Alex Schroeder posted about Gemini recently. There's lots of technical discussion in there about the actual protocol which I will reply to in the near future. But I wanted to respond more quickly to the social aspect of the post, which ends on a bit of a down note. :( The Gemini project has attracted more attention in a short time frame than I expected, and on the whole the project is moving very fast! It's quickly becoming apparent that not everybody is going to agree with everybody else about what the best path forward for the project is. If things keep moving this fast, it's going to be very hard to keep building and maintaining consensus among the entire community. I understand that this seems kind of sad and kind of scary, but I think (and surely hope!) that it will be okay.

Alex Schroder's 2019-06-21 post

The worst case scenario as I see it is that the Gemini project quickly descends into internal arguments, nobody can agree on anything and the whole thing fizzles out in a week. If that happens, we've all still got gopher, which isn't going anywhere. Our community doesn't live or die by the Gemini experiment, and if it all goes wrong we can try again, or decide that these sorts of efforts don't end well and just leave things be.

The future of the lightweight internet belongs to all of us. Gemini is the result of conversation that took place fairly widely in the gopher community, and that conversation, that whole line of thought, of speculation about the future, still belongs to that community. Not everybody in that community has to like or use Gemini. Other people may have different ideas about how things should be done. I promise not to take personal offence at dissenting opionions or "competing" projects, or people simply deciding that Gemini is not worth putting their support behind. I certainly don't think I'm smart enough to design the best possible protocol all by myself the first time I try. If you think I'm making terrible mistakes, feel free to let me know! I might very well listen. If I don't, please feel very free to start your own project. I'll try to offer constructive criticism on it. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and in the end we'll move forward, if at all, on the back of rough consensus and running code, like the internet always does.

No hard feelings, I swear. None of this is worth losing friends or fracturing the gopher community over.