💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › 20220420-not-giving-up.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:02:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-28)
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The current discourse in geminispace, at least that segment of it I have a window onto, is that a prominent Free Software author and blogger who is noted for promoting Gemini in the technical spaces of the WWW, has decided to stop adding to his gemlog. Geminispace doesn't produce a lot of what he wants to read, while the WWW does. I am not going to link to his post, nor to any of the direct responses to it. I think they promote a "Gemini is dead" discourse that misses a lot of the point of the smol net (Gemini, Gopher, to a certain extent telnet BBSes and Usenet), which is that it's a slower experience, and that it's okay that it's slower.
Personally, I'm happy with the kind of content I find. Not much of it is tech stuff, and that's good. What tech stuff there is, is mostly retrocomputing, permacomputing, and small, weird devices. I do wish people would stop talking about the technical side of Gemini on Gemini; it's finished, there's no need to discuss it. But most of what I read is intensely personal. Honest to goodness diaries, logs of nature seen on daily walks, tales of what people are reading or learning or listening to, weird short fiction. I'm sure all that stuff exists on the web, but it's buried among all the things that are optimized for your attention. And truth be told, on the web I might be bored by some of these things, or have no urge to seek them out.
I haven't been writing a lot. I've thrown away several drafts of articles for Send The Nukes, and I'm not posting on here very often. I'm constantly distracted. But I'm still here. I'd like to share a couple of links related to this. It seems to be something other people are feeling too, and if you're used to the constant momentum of the WWW, that feeling could be mistaken for immanent failure.