💾 Archived View for g.mikf.pl › gemlog › 2022-03-29-stranger.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:02:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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How comes be discovered on the webs. A stranger on my public Matrix channel.

2022-03-29

I have a Matrix read-only channel that I microblog to that is public to join.

matrix:#mika_pub_ro:coven.palaiologos.rocks

I made it have the setting that only the messages after one joins it are visible to the members. Therefore, I could post each time considering only the current list of subscribers. Which at first was only 18 people I could all call my friends. On who is among the subscribers depends what I can safely post, with small number of strangers still allowing me to take the small risk, and if needed I have the list of all the people and I can always create a second more restricted channel with members cherry-picked by trust.

So then, as it had to happen, someone I didn't recognize joined. Nicknamed `d806`, with an account on the "default" matrix.org instance. I needed to know if they were another of my friends, so I DMed them.

Hey. I'm from Georgia in the US. I've been getting into the privacy world and discovered you. Found the room and thought I'd join.

I asked how did they come to find me, and whether they are on either Twitter or fedi:

Not on those two, didn't exactly like twitter when I used it. I was looking on F-Droid and found this app, wondering I looked it up and found the site selfprivacy.org ...So I found you on the social link at the bottom of the site, one of the few posting in English. Still not sure about the site/app but I am trying to create my own setup. I am new to this matrix, just adding when I see links.

So it seems they found out about SelfPrivacy app

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/pro.kherel.selfprivacy/

And in the footer of

https://selfprivacy.org/en

there is a link to the Pleroma instance at social.selfprivacy.org, that shows fediverse federated "Known Network" feed on home page for visitors not logged in.

I had randomly shown up as one of the posts, the most federated being in Russian because of how SelfPrivacy appears to be based in Russia (at first I got shown the Russian version of the homepage even), and they went to my profile and from it to my personal website and from there they joined my channel.

That's a person who had a Matrix account (or decided to create one) and desiring to join such a channel of mine. How many such visitors do I have? I have no idea, I track not even counts - for my web website (Netlify says it's about 26MB a month for all my personal Netlify sites though), and even more so for my presently-Flounder-hosted geminicapsule-proxied website.