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Geminispace, where reading and writing is limited to people who has knowledge how to do this. It’s true that there is a technical barrier. People must learn to do things in a special way to overcome that. I appreciate that it is so.
I don’t appreciate it, but, I don’t feel guilty over publishing on Gemini any more than I feel bad for having an Atom feed.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s just as easy to make a polished Android or iOS app to read and write on Gemini than it is to make a Mastodon app. Probably way easier actually, so it’s ironic that this discussion is on Mastodon.
JeanG3nie joins the conversation, saying:
In the case that you have someone else host your account, then I really don’t see the problem. I could probably teach my aging parents how to write gemtext because it’s so simple, and there are plenty of graphical tools that could be used to copy files to a server using sftp or scp.
Making the case that it’s not difficult actually, it’s easy. Well, I don’t know about that. I neither wanna overestimate how difficult it is so people are scared off nor underestimate how difficult it is since the tooling could stand more polish.
However.
“Whether or not it’s difficult” wasn’t what I wanted to chime in on and reply to. It was “whether or not it’s a good thing that it’s difficult (to whatever extent it’s difficult)”. And it’s not. It’s not good to have a platform where the barrier is a specific kind of technical skill.
If Gemini is actually super easy, barely an inconvenience (and I sure as heckfire didn’t think so when I first started, I was really struggling to find a server that had good support for different language tags for different pages), then this entire convo is moot.
Flounder is probably the easiest to start with as long as you’re only writing in English. It’s odd that there aren’t more Flounder instances since the code is available.
Even then, getting going with Flounder is… you need to know what pages are, URLs, links. I have some non-technical friends who have a hard time understanding what even the address field in a browser is, let alone words like “browser” and “URL”. The kind of people that when Facebook was temporarily the second highest result for “Facebook” on Google, they’d be like “Facebook is down”. These are the kinds of schmucks and knuckle-scrapers we need on Gemini. Masters of slack! The sub-genius does not pretend to super-knowledge but to sub-knowledge, knowledge of the under-beings.
Gemini’s underlying protocol is strictly simpler than something like Mastodon, that’s just a technical & mathematical fact. Maybe it could use more polish and so can Mastodon.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown - tildegit
is making an account on Facebook an unreasonably-high barrier to entry?
Yes.
What about paying for a Netflix subscription
Yes.
The truth is that the existence of barriers to entry themselves are not a bad thing and of themselves. Barriers to entry are all around us.
It’s bad that the thing that curates our community is technical skill and nerdiness, as opposed to something like “how good the writing is” or “how well we know them” or “shared goals or values”.
My fave place on the internet right now is my own email inbox. People are in there that don’t know what rsync is or how to make a sed script but it’s still nifty.
To receive a letter or package in the post, one must be in possession an address to which it can be delivered, which can be an issue for homeless people.
That’s a bad thing and makes falling in society scary and ratcheted; it’s harder to get back up than to fall. That’s also something the owner class benefits from. Accept bad conditions & lower wages (due to inflation), or fall irrevocably.