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Gemini usability
06/16/2021 <-- Happy Birthday SDF
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There has been some discourse on the usability of Gemini
lately. Seemingly spurned by a post of someone profoundly missing the
point (they complained about the lack of in-line images etc.), the
main conclusion seems to be that the less appealing to capitalism the
better.
This makes a lot of sense, the main aim of smolnet, at least
for me, is a revival of a more personal age of the net. You go to
someones homepage, not their Facebook, you read their blog, not
their twitter etc. At one point this was common, but gradually
personal online spaces became a corporate commodity for data mining
and ad space.
That last use, ads, is really why Gemini is the way it is, if
you can't sell things, stream things, or run ads, then corps aren't
going to have any reason to use it. Combine with a lightweight
protocol anyone can host, and you get that personal net. Plain-text
is more accessible to people not corpos. If Gemini was big banners
and images it would become bloated to the point of needing outside
hosting to serve a passable website, and then we would be back at
the problem we started with.
Full disclosure I do prefer gopher over Gemini, but this is
purely because I find gopher to be supremely cozy and nothing to do
with functionality. What I said about Gemini also applies to gopher,
the main difference being Gemini was purpose built to be the way it
is.
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keep the corpos off our net!
