02.27.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Gemini Will be Okay, Even If Some People Try to ‘Extend’ It
Video download link | md5sum 55cf89b366e25460f7932d57f74c917a
Threats to Spirit of Gemini
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: FUD, harassment/trolling and infiltration tactics may sooner or later be leveraged to discourage Gemini’s growth (The Register dished out some FUD last month, obviously with an “ethical” angle, concern-trolling with pseudo-ethics), but this is what always happens when popular movements gain ground and catch momentum/inertia (like proprietary software companies calling themselves “Linux Foundation” while trying to take over the whole thing, GNU included)
THE mental fatigue associated with dissent (usually against bloat and complexity; sometimes the opposite) is what led Amfora to a removal of a feature and maybe had Gemini Protocol’s originator on hiatus for a year. Similar things happened in Diaspora. People are very passionate and that’s understandable; at one point moderation (censorship) was added to the mailing list to reduce abusive messaging/trolling/noise (some of it came from Microsoft).
We’ve already taken note of downtime in the main site and capsule for Gemini (for at least a day until yesterday), leading to some confidence issues. That has thankfully been resolved since (unlike the mailing list), but right now the developer of Lagrange says people are “Fearing for Gemini” and writing to him, expressing concern not about the future of the specifications but their expansion or de facto extensions.
About a year ago we wrote a list of FUD tactics that can be leveraged or would be used against Gemini if it grew a lot bigger. This is one of them (see “Microsoft Staff Trying to Subvert the Freedom of Gemini (Without Disclosure of the Paymaster)”) and it’s likely a sign of growth. Let’s not allow the disruptors to put us down and lower morale. In the words of Lagrange’s developer: “Could a tech giant swoop in and stake Gemini for themselves? Out of the big players, I think Microsoft today is the most dangerous in this regard. They seem to be on a quest to own the hearts and minds of developers and technology-minded people…”
He later explains in a reasonable fashion why that’s unlikely to happen, but in theory it is not impossible that a Microsoft takeover/infiltration would be intended to just destroy the project. As former or present Nokia employee, he too should know that. █
“I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”
ᶃ Gemini Space
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