Gemini, the protocol

It's been six years of Gemini, as recently celebrated:

If you would measure the success of Gemini, how would measure it?

From someone overly swayed by the rat race, one could quickly call it dead. Someone observing it more closely, particularly from its insides, would instead see plenty of activity, although not at the level of the outside.

I think this resonates with some recent thoughts I shared on Fedi:

gauging the worth of alternative technologies by adoption numbers and activity is a misunderstanding of purpose and intent

you can create something for cash and hype, most people can't afford not to, there's no guilt there -- but to believe any act of creativity whatsoever has value only through success, popularity or profit is a huge misunderstanding and this disconnect makes me feel the conversation turns most debate into noise

looking at numbers going up and down, being quick to declare something "dead", not wanting to participate (or even deriving shame from) anything unpopular, may also be just misunderstanding what is the goal and how content the participants are in their smaller, slower, more tranquil context

enduring regardless of reduced size may prove more valuable than a huge explosion with an still uncertain future

I mean, if you keep comparing Fedi to centralized social media, or the smolnet to the web, you might as well see life in what could be just the hum of machines. From someone who takes the contrarian view, scaling to that level of "activity" -- as if activity meant anything in and of itself -- would signify failure, not success.

I began thinking about this as I was today looking for a new Gemini client to use on a terminal. Lagrange and Kristall are very good desktop clients, and for Android there are some options too. Amfora is not abandoned, but it's not in active development either. Which is fine. The fact Gemini was designed to be simple and last long means that once a client has been developed to a decent degree, it's going to keep being great for a long time. There is nothing missing from Amfora. Except for the trivial fact that I can't seem to for the life of me change the background color of the input bar at the bottom, but I digress...

Gemini is a great medium for producing, distributing and reading text. It's really excellent at that. Maybe you'd also like it to have bold and italics and blinking text, but all in all what you get to read is pure text, just like a book, a piece of paper, a medium that is transmitting first and foremost its meaning and not its presentation to you. I think that is something with value. It may not have the kind of value that generates artificial scarcity, sycophantic joy or paralyzing addiction-induced anxiety, but it certainly brings its own kind of joy to me.