The disease that affects the Geminiverse

ISSUED: 2025-08-16
EDITED: 2025-08-16
TL;DR: this gemlog is very long, take your time; if you get bored stop reading.

Gemini has a disease, metaphorically speaking, I do believe this is evident and it has taken so far several forms such as:

Is this a chronic condition?

I think it is hard to answer, but the evidences tell us this disease is well spread across the Geminiverse, below just a recent example:

Doing right by Gemini — by Nat

Infants are always at risk

Newborns and toddlers are always at risk to take some disease or infection: their immune system hasn't developed enough to defend themselves from viruses and bacteria.

Gemini is a toddler too; it is a young project and it hasn't developed yet the resilience that will assure it a longstanding life, like, for instance, Gopher: its elder sibling.

Can the Geminiverse risk to extinguish forever?

This is hard to say too; the trend is not promising and technologies that disappear, like falling stars, it is a sad and brutal reality.

Am I concerned about that risk?

Not really.

Despite I am affected by the same disease — as a matter a fact the average of my gemlogs fall dramatically — I continue to have a positive vibe regarding the Geminiverse.

I don't believe I am better than anybody, honestly, I take my responsibility, or better saying complicity, on spreading out this Geminiverse's disease I am writing about.

Since I cleared out myself from any potential biases, I'd like to elaborate why Gemini can't die, or going into to the oblivion, but it is more likely to become a species at risk of extinction. The latter is a scenario that might become true in the near future though.

Even infusing all the negative attitude and bad energy into this project, I can say that as long as I am going to use Gemini, it won't die and it won't be dead either.

As a matter of fact, as long as I can setup a personal server or a VPS and let the protocol being active and my capsule discoverable on the internet, Gemini won't be dead for me. Since from the first moment I've started to be involved in Gemini I set myself as my main audience, and my capsule has been a way to contribute back to the free software and open source community, and anything in the middle, outside, on top and underneath.

Luckily, but I had better to say wisely, Gemini has been built from the ground up to be resilient; promoting simple plain text with such a basic "markdown", that any fancy clients to read it has always been a sexy toy rather than a true need!

Sexy toys are for pleasure

And I agreed with it, and my favorite Gemini sexy toys is Lagrange.

Lagrange

Lagrange really made to my eyes the Geminiverse sexier; if it was depended by me I would elect Lagrange as the best software of 22nd century. This is obviously my personal opinion, but Lagrange made something already pretty just prettier and pushed the concept of text, layout and interface to another level.

There is nothing more relaxed, strain-less, and engaging that read anything on Lagrange. It makes plain text beautiful and comfortable to read, I have never had such an experience with any other software: on the desktop as well as on the mobile; actually the mobile experience is even better than desktop one!

Reading from Lagrange on Android is pure pornography!

Use the best tool for your work

This is the refrain that I often heard when someone try to convince me that it is fine to use proprietary software over free software like GNU/Linux. If this is the rule then, If I want to read something on a screen, nothing beats Lagrange! It is the best tool ever created to read text, and therefore I will continue to produce Gemini content that I want to read and share, in few words: I won't stop using Gemini.

One sexy toy only is boring

I agreed with this statement as well; as a matter of fact I have other sexy toys I'd like to play with, and guess what? One of them is another Gemini client, and if you know me you already know what I am referring to, of course!

When I am away from a graphical session I dive into the Geminiverse with Telescope:

Telescope Browser

Gemini is perfectly rendered into a TUI environment, Telescope is not the only TUI client, but it is my favorite one and it does its job very well. If you like spending your time on a terminal emulator and browsing the Geminiverse, then, Telescope is for you. If your goal is to be ubiquitous Gemini is still the better option we have available: Gemini fits perfectly GUI and TUI environments.

Gemini is still sexy on a terminal emulator.

The silent ill

I digressed enough around the disease that is affecting the Geminiverse, it is time to understand what I believe has been going on, so far…

Even though Gemini got its momentum because the Covid, and people found themselves blocked in their houses with plenty of time available; unfortunately this wasn't enough, or wasn't capitalized to its maximum extent. Surely the unjustified, and extended, absence of Solderpunk exposed the project to a series of traumas that were never fully recovered. Nonetheless a lot of great folks really pushed the Geminiverse beyond the imaginable, but neither the explosion of creativity has been able to spare Geminiverse from the current condition.

At this point I gave enough hints to understand how we can call this disease. I personally call it: lack of engagement.

Despite the incredible production of ideas and projects, like:

This hasn't been enough to keep everybody engaged and on the edge; actually what impressed me the most has been the huge amount of people that simply burned out because their outstanding commitment!

You were great and you have my restless gratitude!

I am very sorry that many of you in different moment got burned out, because you put so much of yourself and you fell you got so little. When the expectations don't meet the reality the risk to get burned is high. I can understand and relate each of your complains and resentment.

Nonetheless what you made won't die either, as long as the code is available, the ecosystem you contribute to create and that supports the Geminiverse, will be hand over to somebody else: others will come after your and they will use all of the incredible tools you made, and that each and everyone of you must be proud of.

I am not angry against you

Yes indeed! I am not angry, on the contrary I feel sorry because I haven't supported you and whole ecosystem enough to avoid to let you go down or let you get burned.

When I reflect why I wasn't in the loop, I can understand that the lack of engagement, is the begin and the end of everything. If Gemini has ever been a reaction against the WEB 3.0, we naively thought we were the cure. We deluded ourselves thinking that we could beat the world's starvation with a tiny bag or rise; or that we could with simple plain text to convince all the others that the Geminiverse was more engaging than the Fediverse and the rest of the WWW.

For me reading is more engaging that passively watching any social media, including the Fediverse, actually long post on the Fediverse provoke me a lot of headaches cause the text is unreadable if compared with a capsule rendered by Lagrange.

However we fool ourselves that "reading" was a universal experience, rather than elitist niche.

Gemini has been consumed by the lack of consuming content

The joke is extremely stupid as much as extremely exact. The general (and forced) habit to consume content, the social need to stay on the right side, have never fit into the Gemini scheme and many broke down, left, disappeared, and who knows what else?

The network effect pisses me off

If there is something that I sincerely despise is the network effect…

The network effect

Is that ugly thing, that can be easily manipulated, where with enough external pressure — and a lot of money — anybody can lead a group of people to accept whatever. In terms of Computer Science it can leads a group of people of adopting a technology rather than another one.

Apparently the "network effect" is very powerful and there is nothing that you can do against it. If you decide to go against the "network effect" you accept to live into a niche; some people are very comfortable into their favorite niches some others can start to feel suffocate.

A lot of Gemini folks felt suffocated when this space started to shrink: this is the inner struggle between your values, your human desire to share with the others, and the network effect.

If you are able to juggle with them and working to keep them in balance, avoid excessive frictions, you may success in avoid stressful situations, however the game it is not so easy: external factors, like the lack of spare time, can affect negatively your effort to keep those in balance.

It is perfectly reasonable that, if you want investing time and energy in a project, you want to elect the one with the best audience possible; in this regard, it looks like that many gemi-friends felt difficulties to find the right audience for their projects and logs; and when your values aren't reflected, by the others, in the space you're pouring your soul and your mind, it perfectly reasonable that you want to live before to feel completely drained off, if you haven't already burned out. This is unavoidable, and it is not a Gemini prerogative, although I noticed it is pretty frequent in the broader space of the open source.

Tell me something that I don't know yet

I am concerned that it does not exist a cure, or any specific treatment. Most likely I am not smart enough to suggest anything to invert this tendency. Take it easy, this is my humble recommendation.

If you don't find this place interesting, please feel free to complain, you have all the right. If you feel upset please, let us know. I am not going to take your words personally, but I'd like to give you my spiritual support.

Gemini is not for gaining audience, perhaps it didn't become that alternative space to the WWW as many hoped, or dreamed. I dreamed about it too. However there is one lesson taht really inspired me, that I fully grasped and adopted in my life: «less is more!».

If we did lesser that the WWW is still fine. If you are tired to support your own Gemini specific project, like a podcast, weather forecast, search engine, is still fine. As long as we do less, we do more. However some services are still important even in the Geminiverse, thus if you can, and you feel it doesn't hurt you, please release your project as free software and allow someone else to fork, improve, and continue your work!

If eventually Gemini has became a tiny niche for reader fetishists it will be fine; if the Geminiverse resembles more a secret garden rather than an alternative reality is nobody fail. We had better to push away from ourselves this modern obsession about being successful at any cost; who cares… Despite everything Gemini "per se" has its good reasons to be alive and to be used, aren't those reasons good enough?

Most of you don't even bother about it because you simultaneously generate output for HTTP and Gemini, I am actually the one that should be really concerned. I don't have time, nor desire, to build up an HTTP server and then dealing with html, markdown, theming, CSS, Javascript, etc. I am actually found my own Nirvana with Gemini, my capsule, and the fact that I must focus only on writing better (in English).

Wrapping this out...

I didn't write so much to compensate the lack of logs, but I dedicated time to it to compensate the lack of logs.

Honestly I would like to see more people using capsules rather than Wordpress or static websites, if you don't need to brand yourself and you don't need to monetize your presence on the WWW you don't need to use the WWW.

This is the reason why today's Internet is not the Internet of the early 90's; it is not just a matter of technology that has changed for the worst: at the beginning the goal was to share text, hyperlink and images faster and better. It resembles the Gemini definition, perhaps lesser privacy-wise than today. With the Web 2.0 Internet is became a giant market place — and it is fine — I'd like to buy online, to do banking, etc… but wouldn't you feel awkward promoting your own free-zine in a tiny spot in the middle of a giant mall? So why doing the same with your personal blog? Because the network effect?

🤨

For comments or suggestion write me at:

freezr AT disroot DOT org
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