Centralization: wasn't there a baby in that bathwater?

I was mildly surprised to read this post by @idiomdrottning, which was itself a response to an earlier one that expressed somewhat similar sentiments.

Re: How should I feel about centralisation?

This post, and others, express concern about the level of "centralization" that is developing in Geminispace. The root of the problem, if I understand correctly, is that there are services which many people use, and which are under the control of specific individuals, not the community as a whole. These posts mention, in particular, BBS, Station, and Antenna. So far as I can see, the folks worrying about centralization aren't particularly concerned about search engines like TLGS, which are provided under similar terms. Rather, they seem to worry more about social media-like services, that have the potential to become "like Facebook".

It doesn't seem to me that a community of perhaps three hundred Gemini users worldwide should have to worry about anything becoming "like Facebook".

Still, I understand why folks might be a little nervous. We've seen how enshittification works in the mainstream web: put up a service that lots of people want to use and then, when it would be disruptive for users to move away, find a way to exploit them for the benefit of your investors. We've all seen it happen, again and again.

In the IndieWeb world, the proposed solution to this problem is syndication. By all means use mainstream social media sites, IndieWeb supporters say, but retain control of your own content. Syndication works -- and I think is almost universal -- in the Gemini world, too. People might use Antenna, for example, to notify the community that they've published something, but they aren't publishing on Antenna. They're still controlling their own content.

And if syndication isn't enough, the IndieWeb folks have more complicated protocols like WebMention and MicroFormats, so site owners can interact in an entirely decentralized way.

These initiatives are all to the good, of course; but they're far from convenient. They're not appealing to non-technical people. So I have to ask whether, in the Gemini world, we really have much to fear from centralization.

Facebook and its ilk aren't bad because millions of people use them. They aren't even bad because their users can't easily move away.

They're bad because they're bad. They'd still be bad if they had only three hundred users.

Mainstream social media platforms are bad because they manipulate and exploit their users. The fact that millions of people use them is regrettable, but not wicked in itself. Sites like Facebook can't exist without manipulating and exploiting users. That, after all, is how they fund themselves.

For Gemini and the other "small net" systems to prosper, there need to be reasons for people to use them. They need to offer content and services that are valuable in their own right, that people want to engage with. In the early days, we could survive as a platform for rebellious acts against the corporate web. But will that sense of rebellion alone sustain a community in the long term?

Services like BBS and Antenna make Gemini easier and more rewarding to use. They aren't strictly necessary -- syndication and federation would allow us to do the same things, but much less conveniently. Abandoning them because they have the tiniest whiff of Facebook about them is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The Gemini protocol started with a promise or, at least, a commitment: the protocol won't -- can't -- be developed in such a way as to facilitate the building of new, corporate infrastructure based on exploitation. If the Gemini community expanded from a few hundred users to a few million, could there arise the equivalent of Facebook? Could unprincipled businesses use Gemini to exploit and track people, and bombard them with targeted advertising?

I don't know. I don't think it would be easy, but experience shows that we tend to find a way to do difficult things when there's money to be made. Am I worried about centralization? Sure -- I know where it leads. But I'm more worried about Gemini fading away, because it doesn't offer anything that people actually want.

It seems to me that we should be finding out whether Gemini lives up to its original promise. We should be using it for everything of which it's technically capable. We shouldn't shirk from using Gemini in ways that look a tiny, tiny bit like a massively shrunken Facebook.

In the end, either Gemini is proof against the horrors of the mainstream web, or it isn't. That some people choose not to support certain initiatives in Gemini doesn't change that: if it's capable of exploitation it will, in the end, be exploited. Better we find out now, frankly, than later.

Published 2026-04-11, updated 2026-04-11

Centralization: wasn't there a baby in that bathwater?

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