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Federated Wiki and Gemini are more similar than I realized

It occurred to me when writing gemfedwiki that Ward's federated wiki and gemini are very similar protocol-wise, in the sense of interlinked documents with a shared protocol.

gemfedwiki

This is probably why it was so easy to bridge fedwiki and gemini

A few observations:

All federated wiki documents are line-based, with each "item" being a paragraph or widget. fedwiki paragraphs are trivially mappable to gemini paragraphs

fedwiki articles form a federated network with a shared document format, it's own smol-web of linked wiki articles.

When navigating the wikifediverse, it feels very similar to gemini. It has a few more bells and whistles like inline images and other widgets, but you can definitely feel the smol-web aesthetic that you get when navigating gemini capsules.

It's easier for protocols to interoperate when they are simpler. This is an important aspect of the "metaverse", which I envision as an evolution of protocols and data formats that ultimately build into shared virtual spaces, 3D or not.

fedwiki has some interesting ideas: plagarism is encouraged. You can fork an article to your local wiki, and then changes can then be pulled upstream, much like how software is written today. This in theory creates a more robust network of information in case of data loss or corruption (in the data *and* centralized authority sense) on any individual node.

Not sure what to make of these observations for now, perhaps there is something we can learn from this, or not. What would the world look like with hundreds of simple protocols that interoperate? Perhaps via interoperability we can benefit from the network effects of otherwise disjoint communities with slightly different goals. Something to think about...