💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 10 › 20 › on-community.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 01:12:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-14)
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Gemini is not a community. Perhaps on BBS where you can get a conversation going and enough people and sustain it over time. Gemini is more like a library where one can browse (or submit) random texts, hopefully without the problems of "La biblioteca de Babel" (Borges, 1941). Community happens more with realtime chats like IRC or `com` on SDF, presently in "anonradio", previously the "roof" room. These chats are more like a campfire where you can get communal chatter. (They are talking about languages on com, at the moment.) Email is not a community; this is more like drum messages or smoke signals sent to nearby tribes. When was the last time you sent an email to some distant tribe? These analogies are not perfect, given the evolving newness of computers, and the evolution of humans in response to the new communication environment. Computer-based communication may lack phatic expressions (frowned on in some IRC channels, as it notifies lots of folks, and the channel has a technical oriented) or moreover the non-verbal channels; only some of that will transfer over video, and even less by text.
More troublesome may be that portions of the United States have no community: few to no friends, atomic families, sprawling suburbs.
Even with enough people and sustained conversation one may not get a community; the necessary conditions may not be sufficient. Think of a wildcat town where everyone is there for some job and therefore a community does not form: do the work, get the money, get out. Likewise social media has lots of people and lots of conversations, but no community if it is angry people shouting at one another. Or so I have read; my use of "social media" does not really extend beyond IRC. Whether IRC is social media or a precursor to it might be up to debate.
P.S. Internet chats are not realtime, given the speed of light, but can be close enough for practical purposes.