💾 Archived View for gemini.swinslow.net › gemlog › 2020-09-12.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 00:42:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I set up this gemini server (node? capsule?) a day or two before leaving for a week to visit my family in Maryland. And I'd thought I had set things up correctly for remote access before leaving, but I had not.
So while I was away, my gemlog came to a halt, and after getting back I found myself busy with a variety of things. And although I've had a bit of time since then to update it, I just... haven't.
Writing is hard. Writing for public consumption is harder. Writing for public consumption by people I've never met, who might Have Opinions or Judge Me or Dislike Me, is even harder.
I've avoided most social media networks for the better part of 12 years now, other than those that are primarily occupational. I was on Facebook for a few years, and LiveJournal for a few years before that. Part of my stepping away was out of considerations / concerns about data privacy, or of disliking the paradox of ethereal permanence that the Internet brings us.
But the bigger reason was just a growing awareness of how performative it all was, for me at least. Any post I made, anything I followed or liked, I was continually conscious of the fact that it was on display -- to friends, to family, to strangers, to the future. And that meant that I would continually fret about how to craft every word I wrote, out of fear that I'd say the wrong thing to upset the wrong person. For someone who has always been anxious about wanting to please people, that provokes a lot of anxiety.
This gemini thing is... the same, but different. Different because although these words are public, at a protocol level they exist underneath and parallel to the Web, mostly (?) out of the unrelenting gaze of the search indexer giants. Different because although I've intentionally used my real name on these pages, I'm sharing them in a community among people who (as far as I'm aware) I don't know at all. And different because although someone might decide to start archiving gemini sites (and I've seen the recent discussions about this), at any time I can literally yank out the cord and this site goes dark.
All of that is not absolute control, but it's a high enough degree of control that it makes me want to keep writing. And to find out whatever it is that I might have to say.