💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 10-07.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A few years ago on Twitter, I saw a fairly well-known writer pleading something to the effect of, "for the love of God, you need to make a website. Social media can't be the only way of getting in contact with you. You need your own space."
And I've been thinking about this, not just in terms of Twitter's slow collapse (I've gained something like two hundred followers on BlueSky in the last few weeks, basically double what I had, so the exodus is real), but also just in terms of the practical importance of having space online that you control, and which is entirely yours. We've been conditioned to accept the web as a collection of offerings we can select from, rather than a network of created things we can add to, and I think the transition away from the latter is incredibly tragic.
I deleted my Twitter account, and I'm not going to make another to try to look up who tweeted the quote at the start of this gemlog. And that's part of the problem, right? Increasingly, every site is putting everything behind login walls. A lot of people are really only active on a couple social media sites. I think for most normal people, that's Facebook and/or Instagram; for me, it's Mastodon and Bluesky. No one's going to sign up to look for you. If your web presence is hidden behind logins, you don't really have a web presence. To the forgotten tweet-writer above, I'd add: yes to all that, but not carrd, and not Linktree, either. These are a step in the right direction, but they still control your data. If they shut down, or get hacked (or whatever), how much work will it be to recreate things elsewhere? You'd have to completely re-do it, and probably from memory.
Whereas, if my hosting provider suddenly disappeared, I have all my files locally and would be set up again about three minutes after signing up elsewhere for hosting, because I wrote everything myself, and keep version-controlled copies of everything. Likewise for this space. When RTC went down, and when they confirmed it was total data loss, I was back up again in a week or two, after signing up here. On the web, I work locally, push remotely. Here, I work remotely, save locally (and then back up remotely). Own your data and your presence. Don't allow your online existence to be at the whim of any site or provider.
And I've been saying "web" throughout, and that's intentional. As much as I love the quiet network of capsules in geminispace, it's never going to be a larger, cultural thing in the way the web was in the 90s. That's not to lament it - I think in a way that's very good, that it'll persist in the same way that gopher has, quietly and steadily. Already I'm coming up on two years writing here. Almost as long as my first journals on the web, and without the huge changes that went on. But, nobody's going to look for people they know in geminispace. For most people, the web _is_ the internet. And so it's important that to maintain any kind of online, searchable presence, that you set up a website, and have things in a state that if you needed to start again, it'd be as easy as dragging some files.