Video download link | md5sum 00694971abd0b010920fe27e4fa4f1d5 Connected Communities in Geminispace Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Much like the Web of 20+ years ago, Gemini lets online communities -- real communities (not abused tenants, groomed to be 'monetised' like in Facebook or Flickr) -- form networks, guilds, and rings

THE 'old' Web was, in a lot of ways, far more charming than today's bloated and hostile 'Web', which became increasingly proprietary (Web browsers are rapidly becoming little but a canvas for proprietary software that runs remotely).

The original Web emancipated people, whereas today's Web mostly oppresses them. "Each service we use that's operated by someone other than ourselves is another point of failure in our lives," one Gemini blogger recently noted. "Each of these corporations is handling staggeringly large amounts of personal data."

"The original Web emancipated people, whereas today's Web mostly oppresses them."In the old Web we had things like Geocities (where I had a site when I was 15 or 16) and shared spaces like chiark, which still remains unchanged (not trying to become more "modern"). There's something very similar to it in tilde.team, which even includes LEO, “a webring but for Gemini instead of the web” (yes, remember webrings?) and it certainly seems to have grown quite a bit.

Gemini space is a lot bigger than people care to realise and it grows rapidly. Towards the end the video above shows that there are now close to 2,000 known capsules and we're very, very close to 1,600 active capsules which are known to Lupa (maybe it will exceed that number by the end of the day). There are a lot more users than capsules, probably tens of thousands regular users. Suffice to say, those are people who install a 'proper' client instead of using some Web gateway. ⬆