gemini+submit:// (was Re: Uploading Gemini content)

[solderpunk]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 01:09:33AM +0200, Felix Queißner wrote:
 
> Most "normal" people I know don't even have a computer anymore, owning
> pretty much only tablets and mobile phones.

This is something that I know, abstractly, to be true, but my brain kind
of self-censors it out of my everyday thinking because, sheesh, what a
terrifying prospect to contemplate!

I genuinely don't mean to pass judgement on those people, because I
don't doubt that it makes a lot of sense for them to do that, based on
what they want to use computers and the internet for.  At the same time,
choosing to have only those devices does pretty much mean willfully
opting out of producing meaningful written content - the kind of thing
that Gemini is specifically designed to distribute.  There is a
reason that email clients for those platforms often automatically insert
signatures saying "Written in X on a Y, please excuse Z".  Writing text
on them is *such* a miserable experience that it causes people to
produce text falling so far below societal expectations of what's
appropriate for written communication that an apology is called for.
That's not hyperbole, it's literal truth!  Let that sink in.  I don't
think it makes sense to try to make it easy to publish content to Gemini
using that kind of device.  It's straight up the wrong tool for the job.

Lowering the barriers to entry for people who aren't familiar with ssh
and unix file permissions is good and appropriate, but I don't think
requiring a "real computer" is *inappropriate*.  This may rule a lot of
people out as potential content producers, but frankly they've ruled
*themselves* out.  I don't see this as exclusionary or discriminatory:
A secondhand laptop that's 10 years old or more is *absolutely* capable
of writing text/gemini content (I am writing this email on the same 9
year old surplus Thinkpad that I've used to author all my Gemini content
*and* software, and I bet there is already somebody on this list using
something older and less powerful) and is far cheaper than any
smartphone or tablet.  Heck, a big part of the appeal of Geminispace for
me is the knowledge that I can use "ancient" hardware and turn the CPU
scaling down to the lowest setting to save battery life and it will
remain perfectly usable, and even if I run multiple clients at once the
fan will never, ever spin up!  What a dream...anyway, my point is cheap,
old laptops in danger of ending up as landfill are not only more capable
tools for writing Gemini content than iPhones and iPads, by virtue of
having actual text input peripherals, they are also accessible to and
inclusive of a wider range of potential content producers.  So let's not
go out of our way to accommodate crippled devices.

The discussion around making publishing content in Geminispace easier
for people who aren't technogeeks is well worth having and I don't want
to stiffle it.  But we should keep it grounded and not let ourselves get
carried away with dreams of massive mainstream adoption and thinking
about what the proverbial "man in the street" needs to start publishing
content.  We are talking about a system designed specifically for
distributing relatively long-form writing without any bells or whistles. 
Most people simply aren't going to be interested in that no matter how
easy it is.  People who are really excited about it because they're fed
up with the web may be so enthusiastic that they are willing to invest a
little bit of time in learning how to publish, and we definitely should
not waste that opportunity!  If anybody has been wanting to contribute
valuable content to Geminispace but has been lacking in ideas,
accessible explanations of how to use tools like sftp, written for a
broad audience, would definitely not be a bad thing to have...

Finally, we have kind of conflated two separate concerns here.  One is
how to make publishing content to Geminispace easier for people for whom
setting up a VPS or joining a pubnix and scping up files is well beyond
their knowledge and experience.  The other is how to make
collaboratively edited things like wikis possible - the two problems are
related, but not identical, and may have different viable solutions.

Cheers,
Solderpunk