Shark-infected Water on the Web
Don't turn Gemini into another "Web"
THE Internet (Net) and the Web always had abuse. The extent or the promotion/proportion of it was not always the same. Dissemination/exposure levels may vary. Disinformation, DDOS, and harassment existed outside the Web (and Net), but they could be handled differently.
Today's Web is mostly "webapps", which in turn became just "apps" (on some "device"). Those work differently from Gemini or Gopher, where each object has an address and the "state" is typically defined by that address (stateless vs stateful).
Social control media started as Web pages, but nowadays it is mostly "webapps", i.e. stuff that won't even render without a "modern" browser and some JavaScript (if not something more complex and more dangerous). It's designed to drive "engagement" (i.e. waste people's limited time) for the mere appearance of productivity, popularity etc. and polarity causes conflict, which in turn drives more "engagement". Then comes "moderation" (censorship) wherein the "master" of the domain decides who can and cannot speak, or whose views are "fringe" or "troll". The "master" tends to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours per year doing this "moderation" (censorship) job. It's ideological and subjective.
The Web started more than 30 years ago. Back then people published articles in it. Nowadays "the Web" is (mostly) just a collective, over-encompassing reference to "webapps" that are censored by insecure men and led by narcissists.
Many people rightly yearn for what the Web used to be. But the old Web isn't coming back. The closest thing to it might be Gemini. Having said that, using Bubble and stuff called "BBS" (nothing like the real and original BBS) people have recreated the social control media space in Gemini and now exercise political censorship, wherein people who disagree on politics are "trolls" and therefore get deleted.
In a ways, some of the "sharks" have come to Gemini. They create a "CoC" (they call it that too), they delete a lot, and they throw around words like "hate speech" (not to refer to Nazis or anything even remotely like Nazis).
Since we didn't have these sorts of issues in the distant past we know that this is not inevitable. Perhaps the biggest issue is the effort to emulate the worst aspects of the Web. â–ˆ
