The MP's walls are glass, being on the clearnet. It's more like an aquarium. I found one of those weird peepholes in post #1221. There are people on the outside, watching.
(Yes, the astute among you will likely recognize I also posted this to Station. Congratulations!)
I've been thinking recently about the concept of "walled gardens" with regard to online spaces and something definitely clicked. Despite the fact that the Facebook guy used that term a while ago, it is sort of how the Internet was before the advent of the big "town squares," and it's how certain parts of it still work. Gemini and Gopher are a lot like this (though Gemini seems to have its "town squares," like Station and the BBS) and spaces like Telegram are as well, where channels link to channels which link to channels etc etc etc and most of it is utterly inaccessible from the surface.
The term "gopherhole" seems to allude to this, and this is why I'm not really including spaces like Matrix or Discord in this, as most of these spaces are simply just private and require invites, whereas one can somewhat freely navigate the walled gardens of other platforms.
The MP's walls are glass, being on the clearnet. It's more like an aquarium. I found one of those weird peepholes in post #1221. There are people on the outside, watching.
I read the post you're referencing and I guess I am somewhat confused, as your post seems to simply be about how search engines can find things posted here. Is this it, or did I misunderstand? Also, I can see how I was somewhat confusing, but when I brought up the Pub in particular, it was somehwat tangential. Initially my "walled gardens" to which I referred were much more opaque spaces in nature (i.e. my example of Telegram channels.)
That's an interesting perspective that I haven't heard before.
Usually when I think about walled gardens on the internet, I am thinking about closed communities like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. These gated communities attract people in because there seems to be so much happening on them, and FOMO can be a powerful force on one's psyche. However, once you have signed up and become a member of these places, everything you say and everyone you communicate with is locked within the walls of that community.
I see these in my mind as big cities in cyberspace with many roads leading to them and many people constantly milling about in them. A little further out are the suburbs around these cities that house sites that constantly repost and comment on the goings-on in the social media cities. There are still plenty of smaller cities and towns scattered around cyberspace, websites that used to be big but have lost some of their regular patrons to the endless feeds put out by the cities' news networks. And still further afield, we find the rural parts of cyberspace, dotted with personal websites and blogs, independent content hosts, and tiny communities like the Midnight Pub here. There aren't nearly as many of us out in the wildlands, but when we encounter one another, there is often an instant sense of kinship and connection that would have been missing in the vast oceans of humanity swarming about in the cities.
I don't mind strolling through the suburban zones from time to time to get a little news about what it happening in the cities, but I'm far too much of a cyber-hermit to feel comfortable in those social media cities, with their bright lights, loud noises, and endless feeds. For me, those walled gardens are best left alone.
I was actually browsing around on Telegram when the thought occurred to me. There are thousands of "public" channels there but generally unless you know their name, you can't find them unless someone you know links to them. Then you follow that link, then another, then another, until you are somewhere or in some community you never knew existed.
And this is in fact how the web felt before the big social media companies took it over, and how Gemini feels as well.
I absolutely love your "rural" analogy here too. I grew up in a small rural community and that is somewhat how social circles worked there as well.