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I started my gemlog in December of 2022. To be honest, it felt a little like coming home, since I kept a journal in the very early days of the internet, inspired by mc and others. I kept my HTML journal for a little over two years - first on a community network, then at a revolving series of sites based on where I could get space and who was offering. And then, in late 2001, our scene, of teenagers keeping journals and oversharing their lives to online friends and whoever stumbled in, vanished. Well, not really. It's hard to pick an end date. We woke up one day, looked around, and it was gone. At that point I'd been posting on Facebook for a half a decade, less and less as every person I'd ever met requested we be friends. With that said, I can point to an event that preceeded it, and which was predictive of the current and unending social media age: the move to LiveJournal.
A lot of people remember LiveJournal fondly. I get that it was good if you never knew anything else. I get that it fostered community via interests and friends and so forth. And I won't pretend that what we had before, the manual method of keeping a journal, was effortless.
No, updating your own HTML journal was a pain. For me, each month was a file, entries for each day added above the previous. There was no web interface, so I'd make my edits in notepad, log into the site (before the era of durable tabs), and upload my file. Or, later: FTP into the site and upload my file, very slightly quicker. There were probably better ways to do this, but I wasn't really a developer then. This was in the era before static site generators, before the ubiquity of programming tools, before content management. We created everything ourselves, from the design of our websites to the heavily-filtered and artistic images in Paint Shop Pro, to the font selection, to the text we typed (what now would blandly be called copy, but we'd never call it that then). And while this was a point of pride, there's no denying it was work. The number of times we stayed up half the night, trying to get our sites to look right. The amount of time we spent on other people's sites, viewing source, trying to figure out how some trick or other was done.
Because it was still magic, then. HTML was badly specified, each browser with its competing extensions. And the browsers sucked, and your intentions could vary wildly across browser and resolution. The current trend of reactive design and hamburger menus and WordPress templates create a bland homogeneity, but they also solve a very real problem: web design is hard, and most people don't want to do it. But that was entirely a part of how we wrote and posted our journals. And so we did, until we didn't.
LiveJournal was the end in the way WordPress feels like the end right now: it took away the fine-grained control we had before and replaced it with something tighter and templated and streamlined. You had control over your journal, but not fully; you could get at what you'd written, but not fully. A couple of years ago now, I tried to get the contents of my LiveJournal so I could archive it in a private repo in the cloud. This was much easier said than done. Thankfully I was able to remember my password (and how on earth did I manage to do that?), but from there it was a slog. The UI is terrible, and slow, and full of ads. There are APIs and scripts, to varying degrees of effectiveness. I eventually found a Python script that let me grab everything. Along the way I locked myself out, surpassing the allowable amount of API calls. And when I was done, everything I'd written for a decade was stored in a sad and fairly flat directory structure, wrapped in some terrible XML format, the comments separated completely, hopefully linkable by a slug.
Rely on a platform for your happiness and it'll be easy till it isn't. Rely on a platform and you're at its mercy forever. That's part of what deeply appealed to me when I first got my RTC account and started playing around, getting back to an understanding of my online life where my happiness was entirely dependent on what I, individually, did and explored. I started doing some writing in Geminispace (poetry, not gemlogs - longer form, and unfinished, not linked here) before turning my attention back to the format that captivated me in my late teens, when I started recovering from the deep shame and shaming (and worse) I'd experienced years earlier, when I was finding strangers halfway across the world and they were telling me about their lives and I realized I wanted to tell them about mine, as well.
maya.land: the tragedy of gemini
In an early (Jan 2021) article about/criticism of Geminispace, Maya describes the nascent space as lovely, "because it is underpopulated, slower-paced, and literate". This chimes with what I feel about it too. I think I got here long after the initial explosion of interest, arriving to countless dead gemlogs on gemlog.blue, and flounder.online, and elsewhere. But if the initial heat had cooled, what's remained is I'd argue stronger and more stable, or at least, stable enough. Rather than just a collection of technical writings or meta-discussions about the protocol, there's a real diversity here. Just looking at Antenna, I can see photos, word games, philosophical writings, tech links, journals. And there could be more diversity, sure, but go over to the web, and how easily can you find interesting places to visit? My feel, and I hope this is wrong, is that NeoCities has cornered that sort of thing, and within its walls people have settled on a particularly garish aesthetic based on a misunderstanding of what was actually going on at the end of the millennium. So many sites unmaintained, badly designed, full of buttons and neat little features, but little else. The result looking like little more than 90s cosplay.
Gemini is, admittedly, harder to get into. You need to download a separate browser, then you need to find your bearings, and none of these things are trivial if you've spent the last fifteen years in Chrome. Maya claims that though these technical barriers serve to preserve the essential feel of Geminispace, that they do so by exclusion, and I don't think she's wrong. No, I'm never going to find my parents here, tapping search terms into geminispace.info. No, I'm not going to find most of my colleagues here either, most of whom just want to have a beer, browse reddit, scroll Instagram, passively consume.
But the truth is, the technological barriers are only such in as much as we ourselves let them be. Installing software isn't impossible; it used to be normal, expected; and it's the smallest thing you can do to take control of your system and your online presence.
That's the thing. It's not the fact that Gemini is an alternative protocol, that you can't access Gemini sites in Chrome; it's not the scattering of sites, and trying to find what's been regularly updated rather than left to go to seed.
No, the real barrier is the essential strangeness you feel when first exploring, that sense that everything here is different, and for reasons you don't quite understand. The biggest hurdle people hit in Geminispace is the idea that they are a complex person whose wants and creative impulses are worth exploring. That they don't have to be a passive consumer, a set of data points, a user profile. The vitality of this space relies on a balance between contribution and consumption, rather than an unending focus on the latter. That's a big change if you're not used to it. If you don't think about it in those terms, you might just assume that Gemini sucks.
Maya's comments are from early 2021, and certainly if you scan Google, you can find a lot of text spilled on Hacker News, lobste.rs, and elsewhere, rehashing what are now old complaints: the protocol is underdeveloped, the talk leans too technical, why not a website?
And like, I get it. All the above are true. But all of the above are false, too. A protocol can be underdeveloped. And a protocol can be good enough. Come on, what're you doing, arguing with strangers on Hacker News or reddit or elsewhere? Is this really how you want to spend your life? What if you closed Chrome, spent a month here, and actually tried something new and unfamiliar?
I'm a weird, quiet, awkward person, and I want to spend my life making things. Geminispace, more than today's web, provides an avenue for that. It's hushed. It's dark. The people who hurt me the worst are unlikely to ever find me here, where for the first time since the social media age, I'm unshackled from my real name.
If Geminispace is exclusionary, it's only because that exclusion is self-selecting. I have no presence in gopherspace, but could remedy that just by participating. Similarly, those trapped in consumptive loops elsewhere could break them, in a moment. That they don't is a failure of their imagination, not mine. I'm not responsible for their happiness. None of that is on me.
When I first went online, most people hadn't even tried the internet. Gradually, that changed. As the web widened, and became more inclusive, its essential character turned. A gaggle of nerds isn't a market, but a representative population is. What's likely to keep Geminispace free from the creep that eventually consumed the web is its own irrelevance: the gemlogs and little wordgames, the photos of trail walks. Ads have completely obliterated the beauty of the online - almost. Gemini is free from tracking at the protocol level. It's quiet. Is anyone listening? Sometimes it's hard to tell. It doesn't matter, because it's good.
Maya's argument is that those in Geminispace are chasing some half-remembered memory, what she poetically calls "a grail quest for the Eternal August, before webscale crushed the thing she loved." The thing is, I'm not sure she's wrong. I'm not here because I'm a researcher in alternative protocols, or have been deep in pubnixes/tildes for the past two decades. No, one of my mutuals mentioned this place to me in passing on Twitter, and I was intrigued. I've always wanted to get closer to what I feel was the best time to be online.
I spent more than a year letting it tumble through my head. I decided to check it out, and then dive in. I've been here for a year and a half, delighting in the amorphous community, despairing at the quiet. I understand her implication. What we had, specifically, has passed, can never be again. But that doesn't mean we can't build something different. That doesn't mean we shouldn't even try.