There is no stagnation

There's been some discussion (via Antenna and on the BBS) about supposed stagnation in Gemini.

The actual data

The actual figures show that Gemini space continues to expand steadily, both in terms of new capsules and capsules that are still contactable.

What people want out of this

Gemini provides a relatively poor source of positional/status goods for people who want to "improve" the underlying system. What is *does* provide is a bunch of forums that get flood-filled by agitation against the very essence of Gemini itself. Yet here we are half a decade later still running the same software.

If you reject the very principle that protocols and software can be basically "finished", you're going to have an issue with Gemini. We just have to live with that.

For software's permanent revolutionaries, Gemini sucks and it must be painful to see one's cherished ideas traduced. But for digital gardening, Gemini works very nicely. There's much less friction getting content online. Similarly for blogging.

Illegible Gemini use, and communities

If you are the author of a Gemini crawler or a Gemini server with unusual features, you may have picked up that there's a measure of "dark Gemini" or illegible activity out there. People running Gemini servers that aren't linked from the main space, run on weird ports, and using third-party signed certs to establish small gated user communities and so on. The statistics perforce understate what's going on.

There definitely isn't one "Gemini community", any more than there was ever a "telephone community" or "World Wide Web community"; there are a few communities of Gemini users, only mildly connected to each other. And there are pre-existing communities that are finding their way into Gemini.

What is to be done?

Like some others who've commented, I'd advise our OP, Christian Seibold, to take a break. I spent a lot of time talking to clseibold on IRC when we worked on Misfin(C), so I am probably more familiar with him that most who are commenting in this discussion. He has explicitly identified that the game is not worth the candle at the moment; there is much more to life than hacking and posting.

As someone said back around 2020: Gemini doesn't need more implementations - it needs more content and tooling. It is a *good* thing that I don't know what the single dominant Gemini hosting platform is. But I *do* know what the dominant GUI client is and there are a couple of other quasi-centralised pieces of infrastructure, also relying on the good offices of Skyjake.

If people want to be appreciated as hackers, write a GUI client as good as Lagrange in a memory-safe languge, as faithful to spirit of Gemini as Lagrange is. Even better, help an existing effort like Yoda.