💾 Archived View for gemini.susa.net › Radio_77_Audience_of_One.gmi captured on 2022-06-03 at 23:25:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Radio 77 Operating for 50 years with audience of one

This guy has been has been operating his radio station since 1974, and his only audience was his wife because the transmission medium was copper wire, and the receiver was a speaker! Quite a sweet story, as he's just been given a slot on Wisconsin's WLHA.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-54465655

It's a bit sad that there was never a reasonable chance of anyone else listening in, yet it's quite inspirational in this era of needy influencers, desperate for followers or subs or whatever.

If your audience is entirely people you care about (I assume family and friends visiting would be occasional listeners), then the remaining 7.8 billion people are sort of irrelevant, though I'm pleased that those billions at least now have the opportunity to listen in.

I see parallels here with the world of Gemini. There's certainly an audience of more than one, but still the potential audience is tiny relative to the web, and feedback mechanisms are ad-hoc at best.

Yet, I almost purposefully keep no logs, and make no attempt to discover who has visited my server. On web sites like Reddit and Hacker News, I'm painfully aware of ego and vanity that I feel in relation to my comments and karma. I try to guard against it, but it's an emotional response, not a rational one, so I'm largely defenseless.

On Gemini, there's something refreshing, even quite liberating, from having barriers to conversation. That's not to say that I don't enjoy conversing on things I think about and write, I do enjoy that. But the way it happens tends to be more sincere and considered, in the form of gemtext responses, or else immediate and conversational, by way of IRC.

So very far from places like Reddit that asks us at every opportunity "What are your thoughts?" - dear Reddit, my thoughts right now are "maybe I'll heat that leftover fried rice for dinner".

I find myself wondering if I prefer this simply because of my personal character traits, or if there is something that's generally more valuable in having slight barriers to communication.