Notes on Community in Geminispace
Like a lot of people, I've been reading clseibold's thoughts on the state of the Gemini community in mid 2025. He writes about a number of projects he's worked on to broaden the capabilities and appeal of Geminispace, and of the frustration when the uptake wasn't anything close to what was envisioned.
A part of this community wants Gemini to just be a social network of boring technology small talk posts, and the other part was or is currently being ran off.
Yes, but people like what they like. I ignore the large number of tech posts full of nitty-gritty details because the part of my life where I deeply care about Linux internals or systemd or whatever is two and a half decades gone. But people like that and find it exciting enough to post about it; why not let them enjoy it?
Sorry that Geminispace isn't (yet? ever?) what you wanted, but it's clearly what some people want.
The spec hasn't been completed, there's no registered standardization of the spec nor the mimetype.
And yet, we've all been making do (in some cases, quite happily) for years.
This is perhaps a bit dismissive - I understand that to build applications off the protocol, it's better to have something more than community agreement. But it's worked so far for a lot of the use cases. Capsules, gemlogs, BBS, Antenna, and so on.
Granted, I might be part of the problem: part of the subset of people who're here for gemlogs rather than building novel applications on the protocol. Fundamentally, I'm here to read stuff. But I've found a corner of the internet that truly works for me, and I think others have as well. And I understand how much it sucks when you've got an idea for something and it doesn't work the way you want.
I know, intimately, the pain of devoting vast amounts of time to projects about which very few people seem to give a shit. Ultimately, you've got a couple of choices: abandon it, or find the internal motivation to go until it's done, however that looks. I've written games that've dropped to absolute radio silence: no emails or pings on social media, no stars on GitHub, nothing. Kinda sucks. But I did it! They're done, they're mine, and maybe one day they'll find their user(s).
One of my other games exists at the fringes of its community, dwarfed by the big names in the genre, but still there, still updated regularly, doing its own thing and existing in a space I haven't seen others really try to do. I'm so proud of it. It gets a little traffic - a few Discord messages a week, a couple itch board posts a year, a GitHub issue every year or two. Kinda sucks. I've devoted a very non-trivial amount of my life to making it. It hurts that people don't see it like I do. But I did it!
Part of the joy of making things, as clseibold points out, is existing within, and contributing to, a community. When that's absent, it can be really, really hard to continue. But it's important not to lose track of the urge to create, which at least for me is at some level independent of community. Burnout is a real beast, and was the reason I once stopped writing for more than half a decade. But I eventually found a way past it, and I'm glad I did. Because after years of rejections from literary magazines, I published my first poems a decade after I first started hearing "no". It took a long time to hear that people wanted to read and publish my work. And that's how it is, sometimes: sometimes the community we want right now isn't where we're looking, at least not yet.
A final, excellent thought, courtesy of darkghost replying to clseibold's original post, which I think really describes how I feel about Gemini the protocol, what it allows, affords, and suggests:
I might add that the way we use things like the web has changed dramatically. We are bombarded with tricks to drive "engagement" or keep us on a platform. Gemini doesn't do this and it is designed specifically not to. Newbies get "bored" because there are no hooks trying to keep you on and consuming content for most of your day. It is like the old web of the late 90s and early 00s. There wasn't much excuse to spend hours and hours every day on the web. It was the dialup model, transactional. Gemini feels this way.
And as an aside: one of my favourite books on community is simply "On Community" by the Canadian author Casey Plett. One of my favourite books of last year.