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Why Gemlog?

<2022-01-03 Mon>

... or more to the point, what are my reasons for writing in this space?

At the outset, I should note that my reasons aren't that different from those of many other geminauts. But articulating them should at least help me make sense of why I am here, and so better define the goals for this exercise. So here we go.

Gemini appeals to me because:

Like many, I am dissatisfied with the commercial mess the web has become. This has been belaboured enough elsewhere that I don't think I need to elaborate further.

The flipside of that dissatisfaction, I remember the tremendous sense of possibility that accompanied the earliest days of the web, and the potential it afforded for real communication between humans.

I have a great liking for the DIY aesthetic of the early web. The days when Joe Blogg's homepage didn't look that different from the home page of Giant Megacorp, Incorporated, because the web was mostly HTML, and HTML was at least initially designed to convey substance more readily than style. Gemini offers a way back to that.

Gemini lends itself to old-school approaches to content creation (eg. emacs) which appeals to me as I am very old school myself.

For all its similarities to Gopher, Gemini is a new thing. There is room for exploration and experimentation. Many things have yet to be tried ... for example, as a librarian, I wonder how possible it would be to build a Gemini search interface to our library catalogue. It's a project I am currently considering.

Gemini's constraints are forcing me to rethink my approach to building an online presence. My first Gemini page (the main page of this site) mixed odd unicode glyphs, images, ASCII art, and links to hither and yon. In other words, I was trying to make it as much like an old-school kitchen sink website as possible, since that's what I know how to do. I'm coming around to the idea that just because you can do those things in Gemini, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea. I'll try to tone that down in future.

[that said, I would really like it if SDF could tweak their Gemini server so that it can reliably serve up images over 30K or so. A number of things I'd like to write about (eg painting) would really benefit from the ability to serve up images and other binary files of a reasonable size. UPDATE: apparently this is only an issue on the sdf.org gemini server. Now that I've migrated the site to gem.sdf.org on the metaarray, that's no longer an issue.]

As others have noted, Gemini space could really use more content that isn't about Gemini. I think I can supply some of that.

Which is not to say other folks aren't already doing a great job in the content department. I am greatly enjoying my exploration of some of the communities that are coalescing around Gemini.

Goals

So, from the foregoing, I derive the following goals:

Write regularly about a variety of topics. Expect to see entries about retro computing, painting, early 80s Canadian videotex art, libraries, digital preservation, cycling, book and film reviews, and yeah, probably I'll write stuff about Gemini also.

However, I'm fairly busy, so I probably won't post more than once a week. I'll feel bad if I post less than twice a month though.

Explore and enjoy the affordances of Gemini, and don't try to make it into the web.

Connect with others working in Gemini space.

Use fewer bullets.

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Why Gemlog? was published on 2022-01-03