Farewell to Gemini, Part 2

Starting from November 18th, 2023, I will not start, complete or participate in any project that's related to the internet protocol known as Project Gemini. The archive of my Gemini capsule is available here. The server is still up for now, but the next time it crashes I will not put it back on.

The incentive this time is this GitHub issue started by Drew DeVault.

I've been having issues with the unfortunately-common condescending attitude of certain programmer communities (let it be the ones in China or any other countries) for as long as I can remember; this kind of attitude is generally a bad idea because there's always things that you don't know to the full extent (unless the subject truly is objectively universally bad, like part of Robert C. Martin's take on "Clean Code") and it will make you look like a difficult-to-work-with asshole even if you're not wrong. Like what DeVault has said himself:

Okay. Remember: what feels important to you doesn't feel important to someone else, and what feels important to them doesn't feel important to you.

Welp, if DeVault truly believes what he said, I find it slightly disconcerting that he never thought about applying that logic to himself in this case. Maybe one day he could finally learn.

Choosing what software you use and which part of the crowd you're staying close with is, I think, a fundamentally political act; and just like any political action, the choice you make today is going to affect the situation the future generation is going to endure. I don't particularly enjoy the isolationist "oh we should only do our own thing" attitude the Project Gemini crowd upholds even if the protocol itself has its own merit; if one could argue that fighting against current situation by coming up with new tech is futile and a foolish techno-utopianist's dream, I found the attitude of what essentially is retreating to a bubble and giving up fighting even more pathetic; to give up on the possibility of creating the future I want is not the vision I've had for indiecomputing, and thus I need to not waste my time on these people and leave.

This is why I appreciate Free Software more than anything even if people could fabricate reasons to hate Richard Stallman any day of the week. Just like their counterparts in politics who protest against the old colonizer and then ended up supporting a much more brutal and unforgiving tyranny, this crowd that people considered to be the current zeitgeist of tech and geek-ness has to declare Free Software movement outdated and unnecessary (and thus ended up having to deal with a much more brutal and unforgiving future of big companies themselves) because they can neither replace it nor destroy it; and it's exactly for that reason that every single day I could live in the peace of knowing that the technical choice these people make is just as meaningless in the big picture as mine no matter how influential they are in the small social bubble they have around them.