On stagnation and burnout in the Gemini community

This post is a bit of an unusual one for me. It's going into my gemlog only, without a corresponding Gopher version on my phlog. I might even take the unusual step of getting this post to show up on Antenna! The reason for all this is simply that this post is about and is for the Gemini community, so feels out of place in my phlog. I generally try to avoid, in this gemlog, getting too "meta" and talking about Gemini itself and I try not to wear my BDFL hat at all here, for a few reasons. I limit that stuff to the news posts at geminiprotocol.org, but that doesn't feel like the right venue for this one, either. This is not an "official take" on anything!

So, there's been some talk in Geminispace lately of the community stagnating. People are seemingly bored, burnt out, lonely, dispirited. I don't really have a good sense of the scope of this feeling, to be honest. I don't have my finger on the pulse of the community at all (which I sometimes feel guilty about, but at the same time think is actually appropriate). I have my own personal CAPCOM instance which I check in on pretty much daily. Sometimes nothing shows up there for weeks at a time. Sometimes multiple new posts show up on the same day. Usually it's somewhere in between. Sometimes folk who haven't posted in what feels like a year, who I assume have left the space, return and prove me wrong. This has been my "normal" experience of the space for years now and I'm entirely comfortable with it, while acknowledging that many people may want, and be used to, more.

Anyway, two gemlogs that I subscribe to have made reference to this stagnation/decline discussion within the past couple of days (links below). I'm figuring that if this discussion is showing up clearly on my small and quiet radar screen then it's probably indeed "a real thing", and so I feel some need to respond to it. I don't think I have any special powers whatsoever, nor any special responsibility, to "fix" this, but I just didn't feel good about the prospect of letting this silently pass me by. Even if I'm not highly active in the center of it, the health of the Gemini community does actually matter a lot to me. I'm not at all invested in actively trying to constantly grow that community for the sake of growing it, or making sure there's a never ending stream of novel new things popping up in Geminispace to keep people interested, but the idea of the whole thing fading away and dying out pains me. I don't actually believe it ever will go away entirely, but I guess it could become very distinctly moribund.

Part of me wants to say that periods of low energy in the community are normal, and transient, and nothing to worry about too much. This seems to be a standard feature of "smol" communities. It happens in Gopherspace, it happens on pubnix servers. There are times when it feels like everybody has vanished and nothing is happening, and there are times characterised by frenetic energy and floods of activity, and it's hard to predict or control these cycles. The fact that by their very nature these kind of spaces tend to attract people who are actively resisting a totalising relationship with the internet goes a long way to explaining all this, and suggests that trying to resist it too much is futile. Then again, the feeling in Geminispace is maybe a little different. It's easy to think of slow ebbs and flows of activity and stillness being the norm in Gopherspace or the pubnixverse, because those are old and established spaces. We are observing their behaviour at equilibrium. Gemini is relatively new, and within very recent memory it was a blazing white hot star, a bold and open frontier. This accentuates the sense of a decline, and makes it feel too soon to declare anything as "normal". So I have some measure of sympathy with those who don't want to just shrug and accept this. I also absolutely don't want those white hot days to come back as they were, but I don't think they are going to, either, no matter what anybody wants.

Reading through some of the various posts people have made as part of this discussion, others have already acknowledged that the peak of attention and energy on Gemini seems to coincide in time with the depths of COVID lockdown policies in a lot of the world. I didn't really appreciate this personally, at the time. I started Gemini before the pandemic started, and for most of 2020 I was living in Sweden, which you might recall had a famously hands-off response to COVID. I wasn't locked down at all when Gemini hit Hacker News and things really exploded, and I didn't realise to what extent a lot of folks arriving to the community were at a loose end and desperate for something positive and hopeful to engage with that they could do without endangering themselves or their community. It's also been mentioned that a lot of people in those days really seemed to have the expectation that Gemini was going to replace the web, or at least a big chunk of it. This was explicitly never the goal, and also is just so very obviously such a totally unrealistic expectation, but nevertheless at the height of the fever I do think that a lot of people were thinking like this, and even I got caught up in it to some extent. I think it was an absurd dream, but I'm sure others don't think it was, and while I'm thankful I don't hear anything from them I'm sure there are folks out there who resent me for fumbling the leadership of something which could have been huge, could have been the future. I don't think it could have been, but, yeah, maybe it could have been more than it was, or is. I don't know. But I acknowledge there's some sense of unrealised potential, of squandered opportunity, of "what could have been" floating around Gemini that there isn't with Gopher or pubnix. I want to be sympathetic to that. I feel bad about it. It makes it hard to just say "this is what the smol net is like, get used to it".

I really, truly, deeply believe that the height of Gemini energy and excitement was borne from a combination of extreme and unusual times (COVID) and deeply unrealistic expectations fuelled by explosive release of years of bottled up frustration and resentment toward the unrelenting degradation of every single facet of the mainstream internet user experience. It was a kind of perfect storm. We're never going to get those conditions back again and we shouldn't even want them back. They can't possibly be the yardstick against which we measure community health. Nothing will change my mind on that, but I also grant that it doesn't follow logically that Gopherspace has to be our yardstick instead. The last thing I wanna do is completely discourage dreaming. It's okay to want more, but you have to have realistic expectations and you have to understand that making "more" a reality takes work and requires being the change you wanna see.

Of course, some people *have* been putting in a lot of work, and actually one complaint that has surfaced in this discussion is that sometimes putting in that work just doesn't pay off. Folks are building things that nobody is using. This is, of course, naturally, disappointing and demotivating and the last thing I want to do here is to tell people suffering from that experience to just work harder! I might have the wrong end of the stick here, but I get the impression that the people who are the mot satisfied with the Geminispace status quo are the gemloggers, both the writers and the readers, and the people who are the least satisfied are the developers, the folks who want to build applications. This is emphatically not to say that the developers are "doing it wrong"! I personally fall much more firmly into the reading and writing camp here, but that wasn't always the case. I used to be pretty gung ho on the idea of Gemini as an application platform, and wrote about it a lot in the early days. Reading and writing was stil always the "first class" target, but plenty of design decisions were made to facilitate more than that, as part of the "maximising power-to-weight ratio" design goal. So interactive applications are not in and of themselves "against the spirit of Gemini" or anything of the sort.

I have to say that even with the current state of affairs, I consider applications on Gemini an absolute roaring success. Things like Astrobotany, Station, BBS and more simply could not exist in Gopherspace. There *are* games in Gopherspace, they work, I've played them, I applaud them, but at the end of the day they are hacks (I say this with respect, not judgment). They all rely, to my knowledge, on simply using the user's IP address to maintain state. They're not robust to multiple people using them simultaneously behind the same NATted IP address. They're not robust to moving a device between a home network and a work/school network. An "account" can be hijacked by re-using a public network after someone. I dunno, maybe some Gopher apps work by inserting unique tokens in selectors, in which case you have the problem that you can't safely share internal links between users. None of this is problematic for games, toys, novelties, but is a non-starter for "real apps", or even for "serious games", ones where users can trade resources and things like that. Gemini apps have none of these limitations, we can and we do have "real apps". They exist, they work, part of this stagnation discourse has taken place *on* one of those apps! Our protocol is more complicated than Gopher, but I feel the extra complexity is entirely proportionate to how much more is enabled. Real apps are out there and see real use, but at the same time the vast majority of content in our space can be accessed even by simpler clients which don't implement client certificates. Overall I can't be anything but happy and proud of all this.

I understand that for people who are primarily interested in building apps and pushing the limits of what is possible within the constraints of the protocol, this simple stance of "look, we've done it, concept proven, mission accomplished!" is not enough. My own interest in apps has waned, for a variety of reasons, but I don't want to invalidate the feelings of people who want a more active app development scene. That's a "valid" part of our community. But once again I think that realistic expectations and also knowing your audience are very important. Cloning popular web applications like Goodreads into Geminispace, or providing Gemini proxies to large repositories of web content, and then expecting them to get as much use and assume the same cultural role here as they do on the web is, IMHO, a guaranteed recipe for disappointment. I don't want to presume to speak on behalf of all Geminauts, but I think many of us go well beyond objecting to tracking and adverts and CPU-heavy Javascript on the modern web and question the utility of and the mentality behind a lot of what goes on there, to the extent that even a lean-and-mean, text-only, privacy-respecting, non-commercial but otherwise fully-functional replica of many services would have close to zero appeal. To me, building some kind of small-scale, sanitised textual replica of the entire "big web" *is* kind of "against the spirit of Gemini". The protocol allows it, but most of the community doesn't want it, and IMHO this is totally fine.

I don't mean to sound so negative about the prospects for more and more exciting Gemini applications. I think some ideas and approaches are doomed to fail, but at the same time I do actually believe that there are probably plenty of novel applications which would be well-received and used by the community. I don't profess to know what they are, but I do think that we're definitely not "done" yet. I encourage discussion and experimentation and play around this point! I think we should avoid the temptation to immediately chase big ideas and huge success. Instead, it seems more sensible to me to try lots of little things and see what sticks. Keep projects small, avoid sinking excessive time into them or building up strong emotional investment. Figure out, empirically, what actually appeals to enough Geminauts to be worthwhile. Forget entirely about replicating anything that works well on the big web. Think far outside that box, but don't explore entirely randomly, and sure as heck don't try to guess what people want and build those things even if your heart isn't in it. Always stay reasonably close to where your own heart lies, so that you derive some level of internal satisfaction from completing a project even if it doesn't "take off". Scratch itches, but genuine itches! Not phantom itches that web merchants convinced you you felt because they found a way to monetise scratching.

I claim no special insight into what is and isn't likely to work here, but I would suggest a few things as guiding principles. One, Geminispace is a small space and at least half the folks in it just wanna get their gemlog on (as is their right), so the potential app audience is even smaller. Anything which crucially depends on large userbases and network effects to work is a non-starter, so instead everything has to have genuine utility for an individual asocial user to stand a chance. It's important that, whatever that genuine utility is, a user can't get half the benefit or more out of just maintaining a text file on their own capsule or their own local drive, because if they can, your average Geminaut will happily just do that (my own ~/books.gmi completely kills any enthusiasm for a Goodreads clone). Any kind of "social" or interactive or aggregational functionality in the app needs to be a nice extra bonus on top of individual use, not the main draw. Yes, this is exactly backwards compared to the big web. We are not in Kansas anymore! The second thing to remember is that many Geminauts are just as protective of their time and their attention as they are their privacy, maybe even more so. Many of us are actively striving to spend less time online. Anything that requires or expects constant engagement will be passed up on with extreme prejudice. Something which fits into the frame of a 5, 10, 15 minute ritual at the start or end of each day with no penalty for occasional breaks might have a shot, though, if it's judged to be genuinely worthwhile.

These are tight and unusual constraints, to be sure, but I refuse to believe nothing fits into them. If applying your imagination to working around them doesn't sound like half the fun, or if you can't relate to the user mentality that gives rise to them, it's possible that developing Gemini apps might not actually be for you. It's also possible, of course, that I'm wrong and out of touch! Geminispace is probably not as philosophically homogeneous as we each individually imagine it to be, watching our preferred little corners. I don't want to gatekeep. I'm just commenting on what I perceive as a kind of mismatch between where some of the app folks seem to be coming from and where I personally think a lot of non-developer Geminauts come from. I might be generalising from myself too much, though.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now. I don't know to what extent this characteristically long and meandering post has been helpful or enlightening or uplifting for anybody reading it. I guess I didn't necessarily begin writing it with the clear expectation that it would be any of those things. I just wanted to let people know that I'm not so removed from the community that I didn't see these posts, or that I didn't care about them. I've not really felt a troubling level of stagnation in my corners, with my usage habits, but if a lot of other folk are, I'm saddened by that, but also don't want to presuppose that anything specific is broken or that anything can or should be done to fix it. I just wanted to take part in the discussion. I encourage everybody else who feels similarly to do so as well, whether they're in the gemlogging subcommunity or the app-building-and-using subcommunity or whether they span both. It's never a bad idea to reflect on why we are here and what we want out of the space and what we don't want, to figure out where our enthusiasms align and to try to rally folks into more activity, even if just a little, while of course respecting that everybody has their own level of ability to contribute, and that one-size-fits-all will never work well, even in a small community like this one. In my experience, people usually respond well to these kind of efforts. People often fall silent without actively wanting to and just need a little encouragement to post more often. Each little extra boost in activity inspires others a little more. If you're feeling burnt out, take a break. If you've got ideas and energy, maybe now is the time to give them a try. Ask for feedback, and if you see someone ask, give it. Be excellent to each other. That's the real measure of community health!

UPDATE: Well, I went to Antenna to remind myself how submission there works and actually I didn't see a single post there which was obviously talking about this discussion besides the two I had already seen, so maybe this isn't such a big thing in the wider community after all? Maybe I should have checked that before assuming the worst and sinking many hours into this response...

UPDATE 2: Oh, I've realised I'm very late to this party. This discussion was kicked off way back on July 1st! I didn't see many posts about it on Antenna because they'd fallen off the first page. Hmm. Not sure whether to submit this now, if things have already died down...

UPDATE 3: I am aware of the following replies two replies to this post, and rather pleased that they've come from two "OG Geminauts":