💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 2-22.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:31:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've got a few ways of getting at information in Geminispace. The best, generally, are direct links or link directories; search engines like geminispace are not great, but their randomness feels like a feature. Sometimes I find stuff wildly unrelated to my search but which hinges on a particular word, and I think that's great.
The least promising, at least so far, has been browsing tildes and looking at each individual user's capsule. It feels like the vast majority of these are, "Hi, I'm x, welcome to my capsule! I'm excited to get started!" And then there's nothing, or maybe a gemlog entry from 2021.
Was it this bad on the old web? When I browse NeoCities, I see a lot of these sorts of sites, so maybe it's not as dire as I fear. But regardless, a directory full of poor (or no) content is discouraging. What if this were someone's first experience wandering through Geminispace? What would they think? I wonder if there's a better way to present this: something like, a dynamic list of all capsules that have updated "recently", say, in the last four months.
I don't really worry about the difficulty of writing content for Gemini. If anything, it feels far easier than anything I used to do on the web, and anyway, if there's an interest, people will find a way. But I do wonder if there are better ways of finding and maintaining communities here. Not in the very literal sense, like midnight.pub or whatever, but in the sorts of organic assocations that come together over time. Right now, in 2023 (well past the initial burst of energy around Gemini, which I missed all together) it still feels like a real challenge to find good capsules and meet interesting people. Maybe Gemini will never move past its heavily represented communities. But I hope it does.