Slop is Extremely Rare in Geminispace, Slop Images Are Unheard Of (Despite Images Being Supported)
Having just mentioned that as little as a handful capsules in Geminispace (or Gemini Protocol) are still outsourcing "trust" to the CA controlled by monopolies (via Linux Foundation), let's examine the state of Gemini Protocol - i.e. the technical thing - and Geminispace, as in people who embraced the protocol in Geminispace to make Gemini capsules.
I've been on Gemini since early 2021 even though I had researched it (without presence) since 2020 when it was still months old. At the beginning it was lots of retro-centric geeks in it, many of whom had come from Gopher and were thus relatively "old" (a word not to be used lightly; but almost nobody under 40 had used Gopher... until some time in 2020; many were the 90s' geeks). Over time the scope and audience extended and expanded. Some more "mainstream" sites (like TAZ) joined in and the pool of geeks got diluted - not saturated - somehow and somewhat.
One that I've not yet seen (unless it was disclosed upfront, e.g. "my experiment writing a story with an LLM") is LLM slop. I didn't detect any and didn't see anyone claiming they had detected any. I never saw slop images in gemini:// despite seeing several thousands of images there. Such images became endemic on the Web.
Being LLM-free is not assurance of quality, however it's indicative of ingenuity and genuineness (not the same thing).
Capsules come and go all the time. Some go offline, for one reason or another. There have already been 5,000-10,000 capsules out there and Lupa suggests the total of live ones is at an all-time high. There's no "Wayback Machine" for Geminispace, but keeping track of old domains (or counting them) is doable.
As long as Geminispace grows in terms of domains it's safe to predict the protocol will still be used in 2029 and hence Geminispace will turn 10. The same cannot be said about many other things in tech, where lifecycles tend to be fast and short. █
