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At the bottom of:
"I'm no longer involved with the Gemini development, so all the tests and tools that were here are have been removed. Why doesn't matter. I've been told to shut up, sit down, and let the adults in the room talk. You have been warned."
What's that about? Who are the "adults"? And who exactly is "Conman Laboratories?"
Oct 05 · 2 months ago
🚀 clseibold · Oct 05 at 00:29:
It's Sean Conner's capsule.
Others can correct me if I'm wrong, as I was taking a break from Gemini for most of this, but this is what I recall: When Solderpunk was away from Gemini for about a year (iirc), he handed the reigns of handling the Gemini mailinglist and spec over to Sean until Solderpunk came back. Sean evolved the spec, and it became the WIP spec that is on Gitlab, afaik. Solderpunk eventually came back and was handed the reigns over again from Sean, although the Gitlab spec didn't become official for a while. Not too long ago Solderpunk has started working on the Gitlab spec, trying to refine and finish it into what he envisioned for Gemini, and I believe some or much of it has entered into the current day spec documents.
As for him being told to "shut up, sit down," I actually have no idea about that. Perhaps some people in the community didn't like him taking the reigns for that one year? That's my best guess, but I didn't see much of this myself because of my break from Gemini at the time.
Ah. People. So much drama in every corner I turn to. Imagine what we could accomplish if we could cooperate, after killing the psychopaths.
🖥️ mrrobinhood5 · Oct 05 at 02:19:
🚀 clseibold · Oct 05 at 04:08:
Btw, this "drama" happened in like 2021, so it's long past :D
It was during the era of the mailinglist. Solderpunk talks a little bit about that time here:
— gemini://geminiprotocol.net/history/
The cultural background and mindset of the early adopter community, rooted in Gopherspace, public access unix servers and embracing careful, deliberate limitations, transitioned very suddenly from being an unquestioned and implicit background assumption of the majority of the community to being a strange, minority view which had to be constantly defended. A lot of people were very enthusiastic and energetic about making Gemini as appealing and accessible to as wide an audience as possible, and seemed happy to sacrifice at least some of the project's original "spirit" in the pursuit of becoming a big deal.
Many people who had previously been active contributors to the list stopped posting or even unsubscribed (some sought refuge in the tilde.chat #gemini IRC channel) and focused instead on writing software for Gemini as it was currently specced, setting up servers, launching capsules and writing content (meanwhile, some of the most frequent and vocal contributors to the mailing list never actually had any presence in Geminispace at all).
I will also say, my brief times on the mailinglist early on were pretty rough, from what I can recall. Most of my time on the mailinglist was when Solderpunk was still involved. Solderpunk is right here, there were a lot of voices chiming in about so many things people wanted done differently. I was one of the people that would shy away from the mailingling at times because of this. Anyways, he then gets to when he delegated to Sean Conner:
On February 28th, 2021, he [Solderpunk] delegated authority to Sean Conner to finalise the Gemini specification. Two new specification documents, one for the network protocol and one for the document syntax, were written by Sean with input from the community. Later, in April of 2021, Sean also stepped away from his leadership role. Uncertainty and surprisingly even silence reigned for a long time, but eventually panic about the future of the project started to rise.
On October 25th, 2021, Solderpunk returned to the mailing list promising a swift, single-handed finalisation of all outstanding decisions regarding the protocol as soon as possible. Some work toward this did in fact happen, but it wasn't long until...
It's cool to think back on the history of Gemini. I just went back into my old email. I joined the mailinglist on March 15, 2020, launched the first version of Ponix for Gemini around March 17th, and I took a break from the mailinglist starting in December 2021.
I still have many of the emails that were sent from March 2020 to the end of the mailinglist on my Protonmail account, lol.
Funnily enough, this first silent era of Gemini was when I really got a footing for AuraGem and launched one of my biggest projects, lol.