[systemvoltage]

I looked into Gemini. I love some of the core tenets of the philosophy (Drew Devault), but it quickly dawned on me after reading some of the stuff on there: I won’t name the ideology but it almost feels like Gemini was developed to propel it. There is not much diversity of ideas.

I think clans/cults/whatever are fine. Subcultures are ok. But you can’t pretend to create an “open” platform only to have the whole thing designed to be the opposite.

I feel the same about Mastodon. Cool tech, undeniably. An echo chamber, regretfully.

[OfSanguineFire]

I feel the same way about Mastodon. The founding generation of that ecosystem has very strident views about certain matters that are foreign (and in the sense of "never even think about it", let alone "I disagree") to probably over 90% of the world population. Expectations are that the bulk of entrenched Mastodon instances are going to ban federations with instances that permit discussion beyond what that founding cohort is comfortable with, so here, too, the technology almost exists to propel ideals, too.

[jl6]

My experience with Mastodon was that you can choose between:

* Echo chamber islands with purity spirals that enforce the banning of Problematic instances

* “Free speech” instances where all the refugees from the above go, but which are just a different flavor of cesspool

Moderation is hard.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah likewise. One of the reasons (well I'm an old-time SSB fan) I'm interested in Bluesky is that defederation isn't really a thing and so the failure modes of splintering communities isn't as big of a deal. When individuals have more power and mods have less, the impact of politics on the community would probably be more diffuse. Or that's the hope anyway. The mods = gods era of the internet was always a colorful one.

[sph]

> I won’t name the ideology

Not sure what you're referring to here, but to me the ideology behind Gemini is self-indulgent navel gazing. Sure it's neat, but that's it. It's literally just a subset of something, but no emergent property or benefit is borne from this shrinkage, so the end result is not very interesting.

That's fine honestly, I don't think the authors wanted to change the Internet with Gemini, I'm more surprised by the early adopters that are now suffering from post-hype depression, like the author.

[CRConrad]

> It's literally just a subset of something, but no emergent property or benefit is borne from this shrinkage, so the end result is not very interesting.

Often this de-bloating is a benefit in itself, in a technical sense. But I suppose that's not what you were talking about?

[Aloha]

I had no idea who Mr. Devault was before this article.

So I googled, did some reading, read his blog some, and yes, he strikes me as one of those people who have entirely too many strongly held opinions, about a great many things that are probably not very important to peoples day to do lives - and will exclude people who do not agree with him in entirety.