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It feels weird setting up this Gemini capsule, as it already seems like I have a ton of other places to write on the internet. Many of them I self host like this capsule. But in all of those other cases, I write with my actual name attached. I found I needed a place with more freedom to write something I that didn’t need to filter through so many thoughts of “Is it ok for $FIRSTNAME $LASTNAME to say this” when in reality I just needed to say it for my own mental well-being.
I’ve never really tried to promote myself or be a brand. In fact the reason I used my name everywhere else was an attempt at openness and honesty. But what I found as I did a lot of writing that because I was being open with my name, I didn’t feel like I could be as open with my thoughts. This capsule is an attempt to try something new.
Yes, I could have just started (yet another) journal. I have plenty out there both digital and in written notebook form. And while I probably won’t submit the link to any of the Gemini aggregators for a while, I did want what I write to perhaps someday to contribute to the community that I have been enjoying reading posts from.
The side effect of self hosting many of the other places that I write is that I see the traffic. Some of that traffic is a small amount of humans visiting the site. But the majority is a massive amount of bots trying to see if my sites are vulnerable to the latest WordPress vulnerability, or wanting to scrape my site to train their latest AI model. I’d rather write somewhere a little less friendly to bots, and a little more human.
It feels like the web is such a hostile place. Try to use the most basic of privacy protections like disabling JavaScript, and get forced to solve a CAPTCHA every few links. If you aren’t sharing all your personal details through your cookies, or your browser fingerprinting it’s assumed you’re not human. Because that’s what a human is on the internet, data to be harvested and collected.
I don’t want to be algorithmically optimized for retention and monetization. I want to read content that was written by a human because it was their thoughts, not because it would place well for SEO. I don’t want my headlines and thumbnails to be A-B tested to see which clickbait generates the most hits. I want to read the articles and thoughts as the person writing them intended them to be. And I’ve been enjoying reading other people.
So hopefully this is a chance to start something new and interesting. I’m curious to see where it goes.
-af