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Yretek: How to keep your lovely gemini thing running
Yretek, building on what adriabatic wrote a few days earlier about how to keep Gemini capsules running, tackles it from a different angle. Whereas adriabatic talks about the importance of regular backups and such, Yretek writes more about the importance of regular writing, how interest creates momentum, especially in the face of what we all tend to face here in Geminispace, the great quiet.
Long-term writing is difficult, something I know from experience. I kept an HTML journal in the early days of the web, and I'd often have long gaps, sometimes a month or more. This could be life getting in the way, it could be the usual self-doubt ("is this even worth writing about?"; "is anyone even reading this?"). Eventually I learned the secret was to not need to write something for that day in particular, to just write.
Now I've usually got a few weeks of entries already "queued up" so to speak - in draft form, or finished, just needing to be shuffled and named according to whatever date I want to post them. Then, I just rename the file, update my index.gmi, send the URL to antenna.
(As an example: I'm writing this a day before I'm posting it, but have at least a dozen other pieces in various states of readiness. Something like this, that responds to a piece someone has recently written, I prefer to post relatively soon to allow for a quicker conversation.)
My previous journalling life spanned 13 years, though most of the activity was near the beginning. After four years or so the entries went from daily, to weekly, then maybe biweekly. Towards the end it was every six months, followed by once a year. I'd run out of steam. And there's no shame in that: nothing lasts forever, and it's hard to find the energy to update a blog or journal regularly, particularly when it seems so quiet.
Here are some stats: in the last year, I've sent 32 emails here at RTC; 0 for my site on the small web, with just a handful of guestbook entries (the quiet not seeming reflective of the hits I see in my logs, which leads me to suspect most are from crawlers and bots). It feels like what I've found here in Geminispace is pretty close to what I experienced many years ago on the web, just compressed. The journals tend to die out faster. The free-signup sites are rife with accounts containing "this is my first Gemini post!" and nothing else. They're not the best first impression of what's actually going on.
Back then a lot of the journals I used to read went on for years in various forms, sustained in some way by the small community between the writers. We weren't all strangers. A lot of us chatted regularly on ICQ and AIM, or for the more ambitious, sent emails. Sometimes even letters. I sent letters and mix CDs thousands of miles away. I don't know where the letters I received ended up. I would've kept them somewhere. At my childhood house before I moved out at 21. I wish I'd kept them. winter, you absolute idiot.
On the small web I haven't found anything like what I'm looking for. And there's community in Geminispace but it's more quiet. It's fragmented, and it feels like we're all looking for something different. I'm looking for life-writing, not tech-writing; I've found a few gemlogs that reflect what I'm looking for, but most are centered around other things.
Which is fine. Which is good! But in the absence of riding the excitement of finding a large community of others doing the sort of writing I'm interested in, I have to keep going on my own. And on any given day, I might sit down to write something, and just not. So to counteract those do-nothing days, I try to have other stuff ready. I try to write weeks in advance, if possible. Because the last time I did this, I knew when things were starting to sputter. And to my credit, I kept at it, just slower. And I'm trying to make it farther this time. I'm hoping I'll still be regularly writing in my dusty corners of the internet many years from now.