💾 Archived View for oberdada.pollux.casa › gemlog › 2023-08-26_gemini_two_years.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:57:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In the summer of 2021 there was a discussion on an email list where someone mentioned the tendency to invent technically advanced solutions to engineering problems instead of simpler, more robust ones. Of course, engineers need to make themselves needed! Someone linked to Cheapskate's guide to computers and the internet, and there I found a mention of this new gemini protocoll. I took a look through a web proxy and became fascinated. There were already many gemini browsers available, but only one that I managed to install. It was amfora, and I've stuck with it since then. Although amfora may lack some features, the experience is so dissimilar to browsing the web that you can't forget for a second that this is not just a stripped down html homepage but something quite different.
After a while Lagrange became officially supported on my linux distribution, so I installed it too. However, so far I have not used it very much. I never figured out how to create a certificate on amfora, whereas on Lagrange it was as simple as clicking a button. In practice, I've seldom had any use for it.
In the beginning, the gemini community was dominated by two categories. On one hand the tech nerds who coded gemini browsers and explained how to set up a server, on the other hand there were numerous barely begun pages with a greeting in toki pona and perhaps a little ascii art. Many of those quaint capsules now seem to be abandoned. Today, the range of content appears to have broadened significantly.
The official gemini FAQ page is a long read (two hours well spent) which, among other things, delves into the early days of gemini and touches on some of its culture, inasmuch as it is possible to characterise it.
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
When I began writing semi-regular glog posts, at first it was not evident to me how to get them up on the available aggregators. As I recall it, there were a few aggregators that required atom or rss feeds, which I'm not accustomed to and which anyway looked overly complicated to update manually. Then Antenna and Cosmos came about, and outreach was no longer a problem. Now, although these and other aggregators offer a window into the activity on the gemini sphere, one should not forget that very much goes on outside of this limited hangout. Some capsules have a lot of interesting static content and less glog writing, and some geminauts do not use these aggregators for whatever reason. An occasional plunge into the list of new gemini hosts can be a most stimulating addition, though since these are still fresh they may not have posted much content yet.
gemini://geminispace.info/newest-hosts
Existing aggregators that I know about have one weakness, which is that they show updates per post, with very active users showing up with up to several posts per day, while quite a few slow writers only post a few times a year. I think it might be useful to have an aggregator that collects a weekly digest (or maybe every third day or something) where each contributor who has posted during that time is listed with one link. Alternatively, a list of the 100 most recent posters could be dynamically maintained. I don't know exactly how this would work in practice, or if it's technically feasible at all.
Unlike some fellow geminauts, I didn't come here to escape the social tethering devices, advertising (already using an adblocker), or the fast lanes of the internet. I'm fine with slow-paced writing. In fact, writing a gemlog, if only one post a month, is a lot faster than my updates on my official web page. I have little need for rapid messaging such as station. And even though I live under a rock, I did notice some stir about a bubble that formed in our shallow waters and rose to the surface this summer. Is it a good or bad idea? Who knows, but as long as a number of users find these services useful that is what counts. As for me, even though I finally found out about certificates, I have little interest in these formats at the time being.
So much for the infrastructure. As for the content, now the range of admissible topics has finally expanded beyond the twin subjects of the gemini protocol and toki pona to also include dresses and who gets to wear them. In the early 90's I used to have a really long shirt which must have qualified as a dress, because it reached down to my knees. I liked it very much. Once at some exhibition opening in a theatre I stood with my back to a burning candle, and my dress caught fire. Must have been a warning from god, but I kept wearing it for years with a little hole in the back from the flame.