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Why I don’t have to leave Gemini

Edit: I make it sound like Gemini is such a schlep. Adding Gemini support to an existing web blog is a schlep. (And then there’s no reason to turn it off). However, going Gemini-first is not difficult. Starting a gemblog not difficult. And then mirroring that out to the normal web isn’t too difficult either. So if all you wanna do is write, don’t get scared away and just join in the Gemini fun.

Community pillar Makeworld is leaving Gemini, which Winter comments on, here:

makew0rld’s “Bye, Gemini”

Without Makeworld’s apps I wouldn’t‘ve published to Gemini in the first place so this is a huge deal.

Heaven knows I’ve often been kvetching ahout Gemini’s shortcomings but in the end it’s a format and a protocol. I’m no more likely to leave Gemini than I am to leave Atom.

In April someone on here (who apologized right away) slagged Gemini in a way that broke my heart and I just lost all motivation to write, felt like I had said it all anyway, and stopped writing for a while and many of you probably noticed that. I also stopped reading Antenna and even as I little-by-little started writing again, it took me way longer to start reading Antenna again. A four-month long break.

But what almost no-one noticed is that I had taken another months-long break from Gemini a few years back, too. But at that time since many of my posts are bi-hosted—they’re on the web, they’re on Atom, they’re here on Gemini—they kept showing up on the Gemini aggregators at a steady pace. I didn’t see a reason to shut that off. (The difference with the second break was that at the second break I stopped writing entirely.)

Makeworld writes:

gemini://makeworld.space will remain online for the foreseeable future, but I will no longer be syndicating my blog posts or site updates there.

I hope I never get so disappointed in Gemini that I take that step, that I turn off bihosting. That’s not a promise, I’ve got a bit of a temper and can ragequit like the best of us, but it’s a hope.

Maybe what I’m just about to say is drawing too strong of a conclusion from too few datapoints, “anecdata”, two points make a line etc etc, but so far it’s seemed to me that the people who have the biggest love for Gemini, the highest hope for it, the most expectations of it are the ones that also have decided to leave the hardest.

Whereas for me... ultimately it’s just another format. Writing is, well, once I put bihosting on there’s not really a need to turn it off. I can, at times, make fewer “reply posts” and “gem-only posts” but I don’t need to turn of the bihosting completely.

Makeworld continues:

Finally, a more personal issue is that reading long form text in monospace really sucks

Oh, wow, I didn’t realize people were doing that. Yeah, that sounds like it could be a hard time.

I’ve set things up so I can read gmisub sites (like Antenna) in any normal Atom feed reading app. It’s there among all the other feeds I have. Before having the feed I was re-loading Antenna, re-reading posts, Gemini was this “big thing”, so when I first got it at as feed I was surprised to see how “small” the feed was, among all my many other feeds, even though Antenna is an aggregate of so many capsules. (A small feed for the smolnet.♥︎)

Antenna

parabola

I have no higher expectation on Gemini than on any other feed or community (although to Gemini’s credit, I’ve stopped reading Lobste.rs for way longer than any of my breaks from Gemini have been).

No-one would write “I’m stepping away from having Atom feeds. From now on, you’ll have to go to my webpage and check it manually”. Corporate sites pare down their atom feedery all the time, of course, since they hate the free web and wanna put all of us in paywall prison, but no blogger would be like “I want to quit the Atom community”.

Here, I’m wildly speculating and guessing without any real knowledge, but I feel that the reason people are doing that with Gemini is that they truly loved the idea of Gemini and what they hoped it would be.

A new dawn for the internet.

I have the completely opposite experience; my initial reaction was “Ugh, wasn’t setting up a blog hard enough? Now I have even more homework and things to fiddle with and maintain” and to my surprise I’ve found a handful of really good people on here.

People have been coming to Gemini looking for more of an “offline life” and I’ve made the opposite journey. I was already offline (not on any socials, heavy user of email but not lists just mailing with friends, making the occasional blog post that no-one ever read, and posting a lot to forums like Story-Games and Boardgamegeek) but as pandemic hit and isolation started wearing me down after a few months, I hopped on IRC at first and then a few months later, in August of 2020, I joined both Gemini and Fedi at pretty much the same time. And both have been great. I don’t have to go on the gooey and messy and script-laden web, I can use comfy clients and converters and scrapers and adapters to read it as email or chat logs or epubs or atom feeds. Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of creeps and weirdos but there are also some pretty awesome people.♥︎♥︎

Last year, Drew was winding down his gemlog:

If I don’t want to read Gemini, I don’t want to write Gemini either. I don’t think that’s fair to the Gemini community. It would be better to participate from both ends, and if I only find myself enjoying the writing side of it, then I don’t think that forms a good relationship with the community.

I disagree with this conclusion.

Drew, you’re welcome to come and go as you please, that’s not at stake here.

However, I’ve gone through patches where I didn’t enjoy reading a lot on Gemini outside of a handful of faves. I think I might be in such a patch right now. But I kept my capsule up.

Atom feeds are a good analogy. I currently read most of my favorite writers (like the wonderful Web3 is going great) through Atom, or through epub, but that doesn’t mean that I should’ve put my Atom feed on hold back when I went through a patch of not reading Atom as much.

Gemini is just another format and I might as well keep it up. I’m lucky, since I’ve set up my system so that I can easily make gem-only posts (like this one♥︎), web-only posts, and posts that are on both.

Now, this “it’s just another format” view is sort of a vindication of my perspective that Gemini didn’t simplify the web, it just added another protocol and format on top of the already huge pile of specs; it made the web more complex, not less. Drew concedes (for now) that he still uses https.

That doesn’t mean Gemini is pointless. I’ve found there’s a lot about it to love, as you have, too.

Web3 is going great

What I like and dislike about Gemini