They can be interesting for a little while but the artists never seem to be thinking about the people who will have to see it every single day, they only think about themselves and the statement they want to make. It's completely egotistical and creates an environment that feels the opposite of welcoming and inclusive.
It's a cool idea and I was using it every day for a while. I love the gemtext format and I even made some "gempub" ebooks for fun. I have a site on flounder.online with some crap on it. Two things brought it all down for me.
The first is the hard TLS requirement. I've read all the rationales about this and still don't see the point. I get the principle behind it but it's not worth requiring that much infrastructure. It sucks all the fun and accessibility out of it. Which is my other issue.
We all know a platform can't be TOO accessible without becoming like twitter. But if accessibility is too low you'll end up with nothing but upper class tech workers moaning about the bougie problems that they created for themselves. The only capsules that had anything decent on them had HTTP proxies. It didn't feel like a platform worth contributing to for someone like me.
I've heard about the Spartan protocol which is similar but has no TLS requirement. I've been planning on getting into that but all I've done is read about it.
What's the difference between this and the average lemmy user?