Meta(
    title: "Re: Mayan and Gemini priests",
    summary: Some("Gatekeeping is a dirty word"),
    published: Some(Time(
        year: 2022,
        month: 11,
        day: 2,
        hour: 18,
        minute: 50,
        second: 38,
    )),
    tags: [
        "gemini",
        "gatekeeping",
    ],
)
---
In response to Szczezuja's post comparing the Gemini community to Mayan priests.
=> gemini://szczezuja.flounder.online/gemlog/2022-10-30-Mayan-and-Gemini-priests.gmi

I ordinarily try to steer clear of posting about Gemini itself. I do tend to post a good bit about the pieces of software that I've authored around Gemini, but those posts aren't really about Gemini itself but rather my hobby of writing software. But this idea that Gemini is an elite community of tech nerds that keeps people out by having a high barrier to entry bothers me, big time. In fact, just the word "gatekeeping" is a trigger word for me these days, much in the same way as the term "woke" is when it comes to social issues. Both terms are thrown around as a pejorative and source of ridicule. Both terms also are applied far too broadly. Of course, I'd rather that they weren't used as a pejorative to begin with, but the actual level of human decency or, correspondingly, technical awareness in the context of gatekeepking that can trigger their use is ridiculously low.

I'm not the first to reply to this post of course. But I'm going to start under the assumption that people are referring to not just browsing Gemini, which is ridiculously easy, but publishing on Gemini. That is, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here that people aren't being -that- silly about it, because there are very good clients available for all platforms now and installation is generally point and click in a lot of cases (or swipe and touch on mobile).

Now, a lot of us on Gemini have written our own tooling around publishing and serving our content. I've written Zond, my capsule generator, and Agis, a Spartan server. If writing your own tooling was a requirement to join the discussion then maybe there would be some gatekeeping, but the vast majority of software written around the protocol is open source and freely available. I can only speak for myself, but I actually went to pains to try and keep my own projects as cross platform as possible, and while I can't gaurantee it to be the case I'm pretty sure that Zond and Agis would both compile and run on MacOS and Windows, not just Linux and BSD. I can't gaurantee it because I don't use those platforms so I can't test on them.

But all of that is besides the point, really, because there are a number of places that you can get free hosting for your capsule. In the case that you have someone else host your account, then I really don't see the problem. I could probably teach my aging parents how to write gemtext because it's so simple, and there are plenty of graphical tools that could be used to copy files to a server using sftp or scp. You basically need a text editor and a file manager that is network aware, which is frankly most of them. If you go with the tinylog format (which a number of people seem to be quite happy with) then the entire thing is in one file. Honestly the Unix command line isn't even really required.

I'm totally willing to help anyone who wants to publish to Gemini, by the way. Shoot me an email using the "Contact" link at the bottom of the page and I'll set you up with a subdomain on hitchhiker-linux.org, a limited shell account and even provide some technical help within reason. And I'm sure that I'm not the only person in Gemini space who would make such an offer.