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Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

Fair. I certainly think that type of simplistic Gemini has a place in the world.

But I think ">If you want more possibilities, use the web IMO" goes against the minimalist ethos of Gemini as well; I don't want something as bloated as the web, but perhaps I do want a comment section of my posts? I think that's not too bloated to be thrown in with the rest of the web. But it might very well be too bloated to throw into Gemini, which is reasonable.

Footnote: An email alongside the post + the author editing the post with meaningful and thoughtful contributions could perhaps be a substitute.

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With Gemini, the philosophy of intentional austerity means that everyone is going to be a bit unhappy, and want some feature added to it. Its "incompleteness" is a necessary consequence of its design philosophy -- it calls on us to accept it "as-is" rather than try and extend the spec. A mailing list for comments, as you describe, would be more "gemini philosophy". This is what the author does:

=> https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox

Mailing lists are a bit out of vogue, but there's no reason not to bring them back into vogue, at least for people sympathetic to Gemini's ideals.

I find it laudable you're openly admitting making users unhappy.

Of course, what's "added" and what's "simple" is a political value choice in an of itself.

Using a mailing list for comments sounds like "returning to the golden days when we didn't need to take non-techies people seriously but could tell them what to use their cognitive capacity for" i.e. to learn arcane UI that never even tried to really take into account all the learnings of Human-computer interaction about how learning and cognition works.

It really doesn't sound like there's been an actual critical discussion taking into account the needs of a substantial array of potential users. Instead the design seems like a reactive wish to return to olden days.

Which is okay of course, just how it's presentes seems skewed in a very particular way.

I really don't think it's okay. I've noticed this type of "tech reactionarism" a lot recently in open source as a form of wishful thinking. This author in particular seems to write about it quite a lot. But it's misleading and not being fair to the users, who deserve to know that what they're doing is a waste of time. Unless someone wants to pull out the old teletype and modem connected to a phone line then we can't go back to the olden days. And honestly, nobody wants to do that in 2021.

> what they're doing is a waste of time.

I fundamentally disagree here. There are ways that people waste their time on the web that are far more pernicious than "learning how to write gemtext markup"

The web is in a seriously messed up state, and in many ways, things are getting worse. I think it's far more dangerous to shrug our shoulders and just let things continue as they are than to work on projects that attempt to present an alternative.

I don't see how you're disagreeing, you seem to acknowledge that it is a waste of time. And I don't see how any one of these is more pernicious than another, there can be bad actors, cyberstalkers, scammers, criminals everywhere on the net including on gemini.

Edit: A point I'd like to make here is that Gemini is not an alternative web and never will be, according to the designer's own statements. I share your frustration with some of the modern aspects of the web but the web also does a lot of things right that we may take for granted, let's not be so cynical as to forget that. I'm guilty of it myself in the past but no longer, and part of it was because people misled me.

Yeah, depends on the direction from which you look at "okay" from.

Arguably there are worse things in society than techies making tech for themselves.

Ironically though ... , to me it seems that Gemini and Facebook, though culturally presented as opposites here, are really fruits of the same tree, just different gardens and different stages of growth.

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