This risk is omnipresent in the universe. We never know what possible futures we cut off when we make a fork in the road. You don't ever step into the same river twice. However, this risk also applies to the projects you like. If we all worried about this we'd not do anything. Rhetoric like "Gemini sucking the air out of the room," "person who spends 250 hours working on Gemini," "it's like voluntourism," -- I could just as well replace Gemini with triplescripts throughout your comments.
My position is something that I know you already agree with. You can't write, "Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo" and think that my argument is unsound—because it's the same concept.
> If you concentrate your energies there
The last thing that we need is _more_ energy being lost to the Gemini sinkhole. That's the whole point!
> you could only do that if the basis of my comment were about generic, FOMO-driven hand-wringing, where A is unbound, so substitute any A and the criticism remains true. That's not what we're talking about.
> If whatever you want to happen is threatened by Gemini
I don't think you're conceptualizing the criticism correctly. This is not "B is better than A". This is a case where B never comes along because A exists. The person who would otherwise catalyze B's existence and success doesn't, because they think that A is sufficient and/or anyone they might talk to about B would just respond, "I dunno; isn't that what A is for?" You can see this with Mozilla, for example. (As a former Mozillian, that's what I had in mind at the time I wrote the linked blog post.) I have become especially sensitive to this after my experience between 2006–2013 and seeing the contrast of that time period vs Mozilla's role over the last 10 years—which is basically a black hole that keeps people from effectively organizing anything that resembles the early days of Firefox development. I recognized something similar after moving to Austin in 2014 and signing up for lots of volunteer events that were by-and-large just organized to be ways for affluent young professionals to feel like they're doing good by burning their attention surpluses, whether or not any of those events were actually a worthwhile use of those resources. See also:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10029811
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
> If you want to wait until everyone else stops trying new ideas
That's the opposite of my position—which is that Gemini is sucking the air out of the room.