One advantage of Gemini is that it is easier to attract new users to the cause: even if a particular user is being helped by the collective you describe, he or she probably won't realize (because most users are oblivious to many/most of the effects of UI and architectural design decisions). He or she will ascribe the good experience provided by the collective to the web.
The web is like a badly architected government such that most citizens are unaware of the badness. The collective you describe is like a group who use their own awareness of the badness to improve the country, but that does raise awareness of the government's badness whereas starting fresh by founding a new country does.
Actually, the analogy I just gave is a little too harsh on the web. A more charitable description is that a subset of the web's users is poorly served by the architecture of the web, but most of that subset is unaware of that fact (what with not being experts on the effects of subtle technical decisions on something as vast, open and complex as the internet).
I am not defending Gemini in particular; I use it but have yet to form an opinion of it; I am defending the strategy of founding a new internet service to compete (for the time and attention of users) with the web.
>One advantage of Gemini is that it is easier to attract new users to the cause: even if a particular user is being helped by the collective you describe, he or she probably won't realize (because most users are oblivious to many/most of the effects of UI and architectural design decisions). He or she will ascribe the good experience provided by the collective to the web.
I don't buy this argument.
Even if "he/she ascribes the good experience (...) to the web":
(a) the subset of users that could fell into one of the "participating sites" would be much larger than the subset of users that would install something like Gemini. The subset is open with no barrier at all to every web user. They just need to visit a page. The second subset requires them to have heard about Gemini, to care enough about it, and to actively download a client.
(b) For this reason, even the subset of (a) that could tell "Ahh, this site is fast and nice because it's simple web code" would be much larger than the subset that would install something like Gemini.
(c) If the subset that recognizes the benefits from the simple web design designs to join the movement, they just need to code simple html and deliver to everybody (an easy sell, no new tools needed). For the subset that discovered and likes Gemini, they'd need to find a host and install a Gemini server (much fewer options, no turnkey-host that supports it, unknown code quantity/quality), and then their potential audience is severely limited to Gemini client users (a much harder sell).
My response to you is to say that although it is nice to help users in the short term, it is more important to increase the number of web users who know that the web poorly serves some of their needs, specifically their need to read, to discover things to read and to publish plain-text writings.
(The main problem with using the web to publish plain-text writings is that unless the person doing the publishing is an expert on the technology, in which case he will use something like Github Pages, there is no cheap way to publish a few paragraphs or a few dozens of paragraphs where it fill find a decently-sized audience without enriching some intermediary and subjecting most of the people who over the years will read the writings to either advertising or paywalls.)
I offer no criticism of the web as a way to buy things online or to apply for a passport online or such.
I am avoiding saying that the web is bad: the web might be bad only for a small fraction of web users. I don't know enough about how web users differ from each other to say how large the fraction is. I do know enough about software and how site owners will respond to incentives to be able to tell that the web is bad for users sufficiently like me. Well, I'm fairly certain, too, that the web is severely sub-optimal for blind users (and I wonder if attempts have been made yet to tell blind users about Gemini and to make it easy for blind users to get started with Gemini).
Someone could write a whole book about how seemingly insignificant decisions in the design of something like a web browser (e.g., decisions in the design of web standards) can have profound effects, but I think in this case it is better to show than to tell.
Improving Gemini might eventually show a lot of people that the web is a sub-optimal solution for some of their needs. Note that Gemini need not completely replace the web in a user's life: one session with the improved Gemini might get the point across to a new user (and the user might do nothing but browse Wikipedia during that session).
In contrast, the strategy I originally replied to, namely, a collective of web sites, might significantly improve the experience of many web users, but will cause approximately zero web-tech non-experts to become dissatisfied with the web.
I have no road map for how a large numbers of people dissatisfied with how the web serves some of their needs will eventually find their way to something better. I figure it will take many years. I do believe that increasing the numbers of dissatisfied users is probably a necessary first step.
I am aware of at least one blind person on the Gemini mailing list, talking about their experiences with it (mostly about Gemini's native text format).
The web is like a badly architected government such that most citizens are unaware of the badness. The collective you describe is like a group who use their own awareness of the badness to improve the country, but that does raise awareness of the government's badness whereas starting fresh by founding a new country does.
Actually, the analogy I just gave is a little too harsh on the web. A more charitable description is that a subset of the web's users is poorly served by the architecture of the web, but most of that subset is unaware of that fact (what with not being experts on the effects of subtle technical decisions on something as vast, open and complex as the internet).
I am not defending Gemini in particular; I use it but have yet to form an opinion of it; I am defending the strategy of founding a new internet service to compete (for the time and attention of users) with the web.