💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 3-05.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 17:39:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
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I've started an account over at midnight.pub. Well, I requested a key a couple of months ago, and I guess the admin finally got around to batch-approving a bunch of these requests. I went with the same username: though I'm cagier about separation of concerns on the web, I think it's less of a worry for me in geminispace, given, well, geminispace. I don't think it's likely to ever catch on except outside a certain sort of person. That's a shame, sure, but it's also part of the charm.
But while that may be true, I'm still hesitant to actually create any linkage between my personal online presence and that of my personae. Even if The Worst Person I've Ever Met is unlikely to ever come to geminispace directly, I have to assume that it will eventually be crawled, and indexed, by crawlers associated with big tech companies, or AI consortiums, or any number of others who don't care about the online space itself, who just see it as a source of novel information for user modelling or natural language processing or whatever it is their group claims to be their purpose.
With the web being polluted by SEO and the output of generators like ChatGPT, a dataset that's largely text-based and novel, created by people at their keyboards, becomes valuable, an untapped reservoir of clean water.
Is this naive? Maybe. But I'm also not convinced this hasn't already started. Given the very heavy representation of tech-type people in the space, I wouldn't be shocked if the crawling hasn't already begun: start with a couple dozen tildes, set the crawler loose. Do some searches and harvest the domains for future runs. I'll bet you could get 90% coverage pretty quickly.
So I'm at midnight.pub, but I'm still winter. I'm winter, but not [real name]. There is, I think, one person who knows the connection between me and web and gemini, and that's okay. That's a good number.
Yesterday on mastodon one of my mutuals, who I've known for a couple years now, asked me for my gemini URL. I declined. Part of the charm of this space is _not_ being [real name]. You can figure it out pretty easily if you know me. But I'll deny it. No acknowledgement on the web. No link to be traced. Only strangers in geminispace. We are what we call ourselves. And we can always start again.