💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 12-12.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:39:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Well, one year of gemlogging. My actual start sometime in November 2022. Conversations with a mutual back on Twitter lead to a discussion of the slow web, Geminispace, and other things. An invitation to join this strange place of pubnixes and community. I was intrigued. I was resistant. It would be a year and a half until I did.
In the meantime, the idea sat there. I read about the small web. I read about Geminispace. It seemed wonderful, the kind of community that has been wholly lacking since the beginning of the social media age of the web. A community of everyone isn't a community. Knowing half the people I've ever met might read a Facebook post doesn't encourage me to write. Meanwhile, everyone kept creating subreddits. That's community, right? Individual forums slowly died. Google kept upranking subreddits. People discover via Google. If you aren't shown, you may as well be gone.
All of this was my firestarter. Twitter was the match. When Musk made the offer to buy the site, then withdrew it, then went through with it when he realized he was going to have to anyway, things got bad quickly. I was both surprised and unsurprised, my biggest shock being the lights are still on today. It's a shell of what it was, of course. Even at its best it was problematic in a general sense, though still good if you found the right communities. That's where I was. But his ownership was so awful so quickly that I started looking elsewhere. I got on cohost first. I'd get on Mastodon later, as well as Bluesky. And between cohost and Mastodon, I decided to finally give Gemini a try.
Everything the critics say is true: it's inflexible, pages get samey, it's a lot of people writing about tech and Linux, Nerd Topics, and there's no shortage of metadiscussions about the protocol itself, or the weakness of gemtext, or whatever. But I don't care. I think what genuinely gets missed is what happens when you actually sit down and make a good faith effort to use it regularly. Gemini still feels anticorporate, personal, small, vast, empty. Half the time it seems like I want to go to a page and the server's down, probably because someone's power cycled and they forgot to reset the IP address for their pi. Who cares. That's a feature. It still feels like a network (of, for) people rather than a medium for API requests, and web has shown how important that is.
So I'm still here, still writing. Sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes I wonder who's reading. And every now and then, I get an email to my RTC address to chat about something. And it's wonderful. The connection with people again, something more meaningful than the nanogram of dopamine from a Like. All told this has been the most meaningful year of my online life since the early web, even if I still leave some things out, even if I'm still just an alias, just winter. I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad you're all here, too.