[knowledge-clay]

> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different,

Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.

> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place

This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.

[hayley-patton]

> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. [...] Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple [...]. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). [...] Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure [...] but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.

I used to consider myself a left-anarchist, though now I might better be considered a post-left anarchist nowadays. More radical, perhaps in PLA style, is to do away with this silly idea of "human scale"; we have computers, so let's do some computing, and get something interactive like the Web, but from an axiomatic design that is implementable in your lifespan, and ensures privacy and security properties from such axioms.

https://applied-langua.ge/posts/terminal-boredom.html is a longer form writeup on this line of thought.

[hammyhavoc]

Source? Or is this anecdotal?

[knowledge-clay]

Not entirely sure what specific claim you’re looking for a source for

[hammyhavoc]

"Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians."

Many? How many? Which capsule? Who? How were they identified? What were the numbers for centrists and people who swung the opposite way politically? How was it defined?

[knowledge-clay]

I don't want to speak for any individual, but it's pretty clear if you just go through the blogs/social media feeds of any of the major figures in the community. I didn't say it's the only perspective, but it's obviously prevalent

[Barrin92]

>This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web.

I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.

I can imagine a 40 year old retired tech guy living off his stocks raising his own chickens, self-declared left-libertarian socialist going "Oh, you use HTTP? That's nice. Corporate? I'm beyond it. I blog on Gemini". At least big corporate makes stuff ordinary people can actually use.

[knowledge-clay]

> I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.

I would not describe myself as a left anarchist, but I think that this is an extremely uncharitable analysis of a much more diverse and serious group of people that don't really have anything to do with the things you listed.

[systemvoltage]

> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians.

That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin.

The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".

[adamrezich]

you know, it is possible for a simple piece of technology to ideologically appeal to more than one named region of whatever arbitrary political identity matrix one chooses to view the world through.