[abrazame]

> Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek

As someone who doesn’t fit into that pigeon hole, and whose friends mostly don’t either, it’s so disheartening to read essentialist assumptions like these. We liked the Internet better back then too!

You’re taking something that’s objectively good, and saying it’s associated with white people, and implying that’s bad. So not only do we collectively lose the objectively good thing (because it’s now guilty by association of racism - the greatest social crime of our day), but you’re also erasing non-white contributions to that good thing. It’s an own goal all round.

[Guthur]

Is there something similar to Godwin's law for when white male comes up on internet discourse? If there isn't there should be :)

[Karrot_Kream]

Well as someone who doesn't fit into that pigeon hole either, but spent a bunch of time on Gemini in the beginning of Gemini (and I might have written something you use on Gemini lol), I disagree with you. A lot of Gemini really is just culture in-group signaling. There's nothing "essentially white, male, American geek" in there but it does harken back to the cultural trappings of the early internet which was largely white, male, and American.

Moreover I don't see what's "objectively good" here, is it the gatekeeping of Gemini or is it the fact that Gemini is mostly just people writing about Gemini and digital minimalism?

[Semiapies]

Ignoring that you're ignoring the "almost" in that sentence...What's the "objective good" in the retro-internet obsession? I was there, I enjoyed it, too, but there was no objective good to the gatekeeping, there was just a very small, blinkered culture that thought it would be able to enforce its standards on everyone who ever showed up.

If anything, the objective good is that rather than a toy for people mostly at universities, we now have an internet that's a communications medium for most of the people on the planet.