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Posted on 2022-02-21
This capsule has been up and running for a bit more than a year now (exactly 1 year and 11 days when I started writing this post, my first gemini only post being published 1 year and 8 days ago), so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on this year of browsing the gemini space.
When I first discovered gemini, I was very enthusiastic by this new corner of the internet, full of people fed up by the web as we know it now, just like me!
As I said before, the best thing about gemini for me is that it is focused on content.
It is not about advertising revenue (or any revenue), SEO, or clickbait, or other non sense of the actual state of the web (and I'm not even talking about web3 BS…).
Even though I'm old enough, I haven't used gopher before, and only heard about it a few times without trying to understand it too much, so I can not compare with it. But comparing to the web it was really refreshing for me. Giving me back the feeling of the early web when I was subscribing to many blog RSS feeds and planets sites.
For this and other reasons, I embraced the gemini world, created my capsule and published my blog and some dedicated content on my gemini capsule.
Why not write everything on both? That would have been easier to setup, but my thoughts were that creating dedicated content for this space is what would make people embrace gemini. By listing gemini posts on my blog but not the content, "forcing" visitors to either use a proxy themself, or better, using a gemini browsers would help them discovered this non bloated space and join us :).
Coming from me and my "less than a handful readers", it doesn't mean a lot I know. And isn't really the most respectful for readers that may not want to install a new software of find a proxy… But that's the choice I made and I'm sticking to it!
Don't get me wrong, I don't judge at all people offer the same site/capsule on both the web and gemini, everybody is fully free of their choice :).
If I'm being honest, the only place in gemini I didn't like was the mailing list. I tried to follow it for a couple of months at first, but it was just a mess. I haven't been part of tons of mailing list, but I've never seen this before. And in this mess some users were trying to move the conversation forward, but most weren't really.
I quit the mailing list way before it died and avoided a lot of daily drama reading :).
This part will be short: I don't care too much about the protocol details if I'm being honest. The main reasons are:
The protocol and specs are nice but I'm not in the gemini space for the specs per say, I'm here, as I said, because we can be a community focus on sharing thoughts/idea/contents in general in a place that won't be used for big corps for making money and ruin it. Not being able to write text in bold or having to handle TLS in my software is a small "price" (if any) to pay. The protocol is more a way of protecting this than anything else (at least for me).
Gemini space have evolved since last year. One obvious area is the size of the community and number of capsule and software written. During a few months last year it went a bit quieter (myself included) but the community is still strong and healthy :).
Some users really have a great impact on the gemini space and I truly thank them for it. They put a lot of times and effort in different projects to offer new and cool things in the gemini space.
Users like @skyjake with not only Lagrange¹, one of the most (if not the most) used browser, but as well cosmos², that became my go to page when starting browsing the gemini space!
I think @ewok as well had a massive impact by creating Antenna³ that is my second go to page :). Really useful to discover new capsule!
I almost don't look at my own feed aggregator⁴ anymore. It is generated thanks to @nytpu's aggregator comitium⁵ but almost all the feed I follow are also on Antenna and Cosmos now…
The drawback for me is the centralized aspect in gemini, Station⁶ being another example like Cosmos and Antenna. @martin did a very cool job and created a really nice place for geminauts interaction! I like it and use it daily too :).
Maybe centralization isn't really a big problem because of the size and stage of the gemini community, but it is something to look at and see how it evolves with time.
Don't get me wrong, this is a small thing compare to the joy of browsing this space :)
There are many other geminauts I would like to highlight, but I feel this post is already too long, so I will just say thank you to all of you that makes this place exists and alive!
On a more personal side, I'm still trying to write content for my capsule. It is hard for me to keep a good publishing rhythm on both my capsule and blog, so I don't overthink it too much and just write whenever 🤷.
Last year I worked on the tinylog RFC⁷ as I believed (and still do) that tinylog could have a better place in the gemini space.
I still think it is underused and that's why I'm still developing GTL⁸ (even though I took a break last year). I still enjoy reading tinylog entries during the day and I'm always happy when someone reach out to add their feed to the tinylog aggregator⁹.
Don't hesitate to email me if you add your own :].
I do feel like the RFC at its current stage might feel too complex for new user, so I'm hopping to take the time to put together a simpler v2. It might mean more restriction, I don't know yet but I want to remove some complexity in it.
I don't know, more gemini cool thing to come I guess, the community is smart, active and full of people ready to open their beloved IDE to code new thing, so we'll see :].