💾 Archived View for rosenzweig.io › gemlog › 2020-11-01-gemini-day-2.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 01:18:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I first heard of the Gemini protocol a few months into the pandemic, and I finally got around to setting up a server and finding a client I liked, so I'm now settling into a Gemini routine. A few thoughts on day two of this experiment:
Gemini, both technically and socially, is simple and forgiving in a novel way for me.
My main blog has an elaborate set of hacks to approach something minimally reasonable. Something about blogging in a subset of an extension of markdown, converting posts to HTML via pandoc and a custom template designed to save bytes, some CSS I feel the need to keep changing and with which am never quite satisfied, all topped off with a horrifying set of Makefiles and regular expressions to keep it together and push out an RSS feed.
That is... intense. Not in a good way, either.
With my gemlog I'm happy to type out gemtext directly with zero postprocessing at any layer of the stack, push it up, and that's it.
One outstanding question is how to handle punctuation. I compose with raw quote and dash symbols, and for the web, pandoc converts to the correct Unicode variants. If anyone knows a good way to handle this with gemtext, let me know.
Other than that, Gemini frees me from worrying about staying "competitive" with CSS, whatever that means. Out of the box, my gemlog will look great to me.
To everypony else, it won't look any worse than any other site in Geminispace :-)
The Gemini community is touching, and the quiet is refreshing. That may be temporary; with 100x the users in Geminispace, this might be a mere memory. But I feel grateful for the present.
Indeed, I rarely blog _because_ of the traffic to my main site. There's too much pressure to make every post perfect. With the quiet here, I feel comfortable posting raw thought.
Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to show the real Alyssa on the web and not just on Geminispace. And publicly logged IRC channels. Yeah, the extent of my silliness is hardly a secret.
I confess I spend far too much time online, and nowadays that's socially acceptable.
I hate it.
I hate the hours spent scrolling through Reddit, Hacker News, lobste.rs, Phoronix, LWN, even the national news a dozen times a day. I hate the incessant urge to hit refresh.
Here's a secret: if you struggle with this too, it isn't your fault. You are not weak or lacking "willpower".
The web is built _against_ our psychological best interests. The colours, the scrolling, the animations, the vitriolic comments section, the dark patterns all serve to lure and trap you, because ad revenue.
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As many before me observed, Gemini resists. No inline images or JavaScript forces pages to be text-only. No publisher-defined styling empowers the user to control the presentation.
Indeed, it's harder to get addicted to reading black-and-white text than to a colourful infinity of useless images.
I use uMatrix with Firefox to block images, multimedia, and JavaScript globally, with a site-specific allow-list. I wish I could block CSS as well, but far too much breaks, even relative to JavaScript. Even with these restraints, the web is still an attention nightmare.
Gemini means I don't have to fight the publisher to read in an attention-respecting format. The default _is_ respect for the user.
"Accessibility" usually means "screen readers" to software developers. Screen reader accessibility does matter, but unless a website goes out of their way to break it, it is the default. Yet accessibility encompasses inclusion of people with a range of disabilities. Given the difficulty of constructing Gemtext that isn't screen reader accessible, I'd like to focus on accessibility for people with sensory and stimulation processing differences.
Next to the sensory hell called "the web", Gemini is a dream, accessible in ways the web cannot be. Even conservative web pages like mine require opinionated CSS. Users cannot feasibly disable CSS without severe degradation. Simply disabling _colour_ can create accessibility issues due to reduced contrast.
Gemini works just fine without colour, thank you.
Since sensory and stimulation processing differences are associated with the autism spectrum and ADHD, does the web transcend annoying and addictive to inaccessible?
Could Gemini provide a refuge?
I haven't been optimistic lately. I've given in to the urge to Reddit, reasoning burning time online is no worse than the pandemic alternatives. Not to mention the election dread looming across the border.
Nevertheless, I set up my gemlog last night with an unfamiliar optimism. I haven't opened any of my usual bad sites today. I've composed this post offline with nothing more than vim and a framebuffer console.
Here's to a better home online for a happier Alyssa, with a little less HTML and a little more Gemini.