I recently read Stack's newest post and hit this spot in it.
If Gemini ever becomes a valuable entity, it will be seized by one or more corporations. It will be googleized, twittered, and facebooked (ahem, metaversed I suppose) overnight.
And I think the answer is, we will find somewhere new. I think the digital landscape offers us the change to carve out new places in an endless sea of interconnected computers.
Your own life, or your band's, or even your species' might be owed to a restless few-drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
—We Are Wanderers - Carl Sagan
2 years ago · 👍 birabittoh, cobradile94, thenextseldoncrisis, jsv, emk
@krixano Sure, after Mosaic (which Marc Andreesson did also work on, granted).
But yeah, I do think it unlikely that Gemini ever becomes popular enough to be worth co-opting for moneyed interests. · 2 years ago
@lykso @kevinsan @cobradile94 Just to join in on this :D
The first web browsers were created by corporations themselves. · 2 years ago
@lykso The difference there was that HTML was expandable from the get go, Gemini isn’t. · 2 years ago
The fear is real I believe, but I think to an extent it also takes "us" as the user to allow it to happen - the current status of https/web2/corporate web has happened because of reliance upon four or five major platforms, and an inability to get a similar experience elsewhere. But if expectations can shift, I imagine some "protection" to greed and exploitative mindsets can be built-in - I am actually curious as to how gemini could grow in powerful and "useful" ways without needing the baggage of ads etc etc. An example here is I have often wondered if a library could one day operate with computers that only connect to gemini network ... thoughts? · 2 years ago
@lykso the first web browsers did not have the users corporate interests needed :) · 2 years ago
@cobradile94 The first Web browsers likewise did not have the tools corporate interests needed. · 2 years ago
@kevinsan I am the first reader of my capsule. It is my personal nerd-tech diary but I am happy is someone else can find help or joy from it.
Sharing is caring... 🤗 · 2 years ago
Even defamation could be viewed as an advantage. The people who are here tend to think for themselves, which is something I for one value a lot, even if I don't find everything written of interest to me. · 2 years ago
No one will ever harn the Gemini space directly, it is useless.
The real risk is "defamation", so far has been made by single individuals with a personal bias against the protcol.
But if the growth of Gemini would coincide with lesser traffic on WWW and lesser use of Gugl Search for instance, we surely will assist to the "defamation machine" in action!
We will see a reduced set of HTTP/HTML and simple static website generators pushed as mantra everywhere! We will obeserve the established Tech Press attacking the Gemini Space like never before.
But who care? People who believe in Gemini's value will continue to serve Gemini content only not matter what. 😉 · 2 years ago
I agree with @cobradile94, Gemini's lack of extensibility and enforced sparseness keeps it 'clean' so to speak. I do think there's some 'security in obscurity' going on (that is, people who would monetize ♊ don't know about it, so they aren't monetizing it) — even so, it's more difficult to 'make webby' Gemini. · 2 years ago
I mean, even if corporations come on here, what can they do? The protocol just doesn’t have the tools they need to do the underhanded business tactics they implement on the web. · 2 years ago
Much of that post is highly speculative, but I guess that's the point: prepare for dangers that we might face in the future.
I think the first section should be seriously considered already now, though. Aggregators, search engines, and popular clients are pivotal power centers that should be protected. This is mostly a concern for the few people that run these services/sites, though. My recommentation is to provide alternate means of validating the sites' content. One straightforward and well-supported technique is PGP signatures, like those commonly used for distributing software. For example, I'm providing signatures for all Lagrange binaries.
Always prefer multiple factors. · 2 years ago
Stack is seriously overthinking Gemini. Gemini is a protocol for simple browsers and it supports a neat little blogosphere of mostly tech people. The tools are too simple for corporate monopolization.
For the other criticisms, well, nobody claimed Gemini was perfect. Stack boxes at shadows on most of those points. · 2 years ago
Stack's post can be found here.
gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-02-17.attack_surface.gmi · 2 years ago
gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-02-17.attack_surface.gmi