Gemini 网络的反营销方面
原文：The anti-marketing aspect of the Gemini network
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by Ploum on 2026-11-12
And why your niche should stay a niche
I like Gemini. Not the Google Chatbot but the network that existed before Google named its product. If you are enough of a geek, you may want to give it a try.
Eoin is counting the number of "capsules" on the Gemini network. A capsule is the equivalent of a "website" on the Web or a "hole" on Gopher. It’s a personal space, a bunch of pages. Blogs become "gemlogs".
Eoin’s first observation is that the number of active capsules is slowly growing. The network is healthy.
But his second observation is really interesting: there’s absolutely no correlation between the number of new capsules in a given month and articles about the Gemini protocol being promoted on the first page of Hacker News.
This is a confirmation of what I’ve benn trying to explain for years: your metrics and web statistics are completely useless. The number of visitors, the number of clicks are worthless if you are not a marketer trying to extract money from a big brand. They don’t mean anything.
By the way: you should really avoid Hacker News these days. The front page is heavily manipulated to promote pro-AI stuff and bury everything that might question wether fascism-capitalism is good.
A Mozilla employee is leaving after 15 years and comes to a similar conclusion. Mozilla is awesome because it has always been abnormal. It is mostly used by abnormal people. This means that hiring "normal managers" who try to make it "normal" and chase "normal" metrics is, of course, a recipe for failure.
I always failed to understand those marketing people who try to be "like others but a bit cheaper". While all the value is being different enough to nurture your own niche.
I completely removed statistics from my blog in 2013. At the time, I had a very strong realisation that the blog posts that mattered most, those I was proudest of, and those that prompted people to mail me even years later all had mediocre statistics.
On the contrary, most of my hit, my "buzz", were quickly forgotten. But, being addicted to statistics, I was unconsciously adapting my writing style to improve those numbers. I was scrolling through social media posts that were highly popular while trying to create some myself.
Closing my social media accounts and, instead, procrastinating on Gemini had the opposite effect: making me read other ideas without caring about reactions, about popularity. Jsreed5 made the same observation while he was trying the Nostr protocol.
While Nostr’s technicalities may be interesting by themselves, the content on it is similar to the one found of mainstream social networks. And our smolnet Gemini-formatted brains cannot take it anymore!
We really need a simple Gemini hosting provider that would also provide a Web version, to welcome less technical-minded people who still may want to access a quieter, non-commercial, out-of-time virtual space.
Lot of people are trying Gemini and find that there’s no content on it, that they can’t have their news and dopamine hit on it. Well, that’s exactly the point.
The fact that only a niche minority want to use it is also part of the point. Gemini might no be for you. That’s fine. The modern Web and even the real world (where every device is actively working against me and every human interaction seems to be about AI) is increasingly not for me. So let me have my strange niche space.
About the author
I’m Ploum , a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss . I value privacy and never share your adress.
I write science-fiction novels in French . For Bikepunk , my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me !
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