Meta(
    title: "On Bubble, centralization and federation",
    summary: Some("The obvious initial success of Bubble shows that this is something that people really want. But can we do better?"),
    published: Some(Time(
        year: 2023,
        month: 5,
        day: 19,
        hour: 23,
        minute: 17,
        second: 16,
    )),
    tags: [
        "bubble",
        "centralization",
        "federation",
        "gemini",
    ],
)
---
I'm going to break my own rule about posting on Gemini about Gemini because I think we're at an important moment right now. I don't want to rehash the entire discussion right now because you would have had to be offline for the past week or living in a cave to have missed it. There have been a lot of great points brought up, and the civility and thoughtfulness of the discussion is a credit to everyone involved. Thank you everyone, for proving my faith in Gemini as a community to be well founded.

At any rate, Bubble is off to such a roaring start that it's blaringly obvious this is something that people want. Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving up my own capsule any time soon, and I'll still be pushing my feed to Antenna for each and every post. But Bubble is off to a roaring start. Having tried it I have to say it really is pretty slick. From a technical standpoint, bravo to Skyjake for pulling this off so quickly.

## Two paths forward
I'm not going to present a night and day scenario here where one path leads to a rewarding community experience and the other to distopian nightmare. I don't think you really could ruin Gemini, although it might be possible to create a big toxic social network if you really wanted to (Bubble proves that the social network over Gemini is possible. The toxicity is just human nature creaping in if left unchecked). At any rate, however, I do see two paths.

### Path One - a few Bubbles, but everyone uses geminispace.org
Skyjake already has an issue up about federating with other Bubble instances.
=> gemini://geminispace.org/s/Bubble-Issues/17

Even having this as an issue for the project is a great sign. But really I doubt that we're going to see a bunch of different Bubble instances all living together in harmony. For one thing, there's a lot less people using Gemini than there are using the big web. For another, it already has traction. And finally, I don't think it would be healthy if Bubble was the lone option for federating with other Bubble instances. Which leads me to path two.

### Path two - we, as a community, work up a spec and do this right
The fediverse has it's issues, but what it does have going for it is a clearly written specification and multiple implementations of same. Mastodon may be the biggest, but you also have pleroma, pixalfed, funkwhale, and gotosocial to name just a few. That part really matches the ethos of Gemini IMO. Gemini has a well written spec and numerous different servers and clients. Lagrange may be dominating the client space but we do have other options, and we have a whole lot of different server implementations to choose from. My favorite one happens to be "roll your own" due to the fact that the spec is not only very clearly written but also pretty darn simple. So simple that there are fully functional clients written in everything from C/C++ to Python to Rust to shell scripts.

I really think that rather than starting with an implementation in Bubble for federating with other Bubble instances we would be better served by actually working out a way for different Gemini services to federatein a more generic way, so that people could continue to roll their own. Bubble could then be one implementation of a protocol, rather than not having a protocol at all, or having the protocol be "try to match what Bubble does". That's not to say anything negative about what Skyjake is doing. I'm a fan. I just think that this past week has raised some questions, and I think it's time for all of us, or at least some of us, to step up and decide what we want to do going forward considering this type of service is obviously going to be popular.

I would be happy to put time into this. I'm not putting myself forth for any type of leadership capacity, but I'll gladly collaborate with anyone who this resonates with who might want to take it past talk. I hope to get some response to this one. Normally I'm fine with just putting my words out to the void but please do contact me with any thoughts on this post. Email is good, as are your own gemlog posts, or even conversing over Bubble for that matter. Thanks in advance.
