In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web.

While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters.

Well it matters as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders but not as cultural artifact you can share with others.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It's about monopolizing access to information.

If you care about the web, about people's ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-Googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don't use their browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment.

Gemini Quickstart!

A Quick Start Guide For New Gemini Users

@oceane I feel like Gemini (as in the protocol) has potential but right now it feels like it's just a blogging system and I can't tell if it wants to be more than that.
@nini Your comment could apply to Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, and to some parts of Instagram. Given Google’s vested interests in Facebook, I’m not sure I get your comment – what do you think Gemini should be?
@nini I’m not saying it’s a bad reply I just don’t get what you mean here, I think I’m missing out on some part of the potential of Gemini and I think your reply could be valuable for my research as well!

@oceane What I say could apply to those things but they're not trying to be a protocol, they're sites. Gemini seems to have the potential for a small web sort of thing but it could be more than just blogs as the internet even in the 90s wasn't just blogs but it was forums, BBSes, repositories for data and whatever else it could be if someone could make it.

Might be me not being sure what Gemini is as well, it's a touch vague in those terms and seems good with being for blogs only which is fine if that's all it needs to be.