💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 5-29.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 08:06:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm a big fan of skyjake's work on Lagrange. I use amfora on the CLI to proofread my gemlog, but all my actual browsing, my exploration, is in Lagrange. It's well laid out. It's beautiful. Just a singular and deeply impressive piece of software, one I like using very much. I've been a developer professionally for seventeen years in September. There's very little software I like, and a lot that I don't.
skyjake recently released Bubble, bulletin boards for gemini, and which draws inspiration from a variety of sources - forums, reddit, and others. Comments, notifications, you name it. For some people, it will fill a need. That dopamine hit: comments, likes, notifications delivered to you real time, if that's what you want.
But that's not what I want. I'm not trying to slow down, necessarily - I think the pace of my writing, here and elsewhere, has picked up dramatically. In addition to the literary writing I've been doing, I've been keeping up this gemlog, a journal on the small web, even a bit on the less-shitty social networks (Mastodon and cohost). What I'm looking for does include longer writing. Something beyond the length of a tweet, of the first complete thought. But there's something more crucial: I'm looking for asynchonicity. Publish-and-silence. This isn't for everyone. But it's what works for me.
Everyone Has a Take on Bubble. Here's Mine
Michael Nordmeyer points out that microblogging gutted blogging. I think that's mostly correct. I'm not actually sure if microblogging killed it - for all the fire and trumpets around the impact of Twitter, it's always had far fewer users than Facebook, or Instagram. Hundreds of millions, rather than billions. Still a staggering number, but not really the society-changing force Facebook has become.
But he's definitely right in that sense that social media has siphoned people away from the personal internet, all the sites owned and run by, well, people. Bubble may not be explicitly a move to undo what we've got here, but it may end up something like that. Is that dangerous? I hope not. But also: not really. This is geminispace. I'd be shocked if any of this this ever advances beyond the boundaries of tech enthusiasts and beautiful misfits.
I'll weasel: there's room for writers, and there's room for posters. If Bubble draws people in, that's great. But I'm not interested. You won't find me there. I'll keep up this capsule until I don't; I'll write here until I'm done.