First Week Retrospective

So I’ve been posting to gemspace for a little over a week. I have opinions! But nothing too drastic.

The thing you can’t know, because I haven’t said, is that as well as posting daily I’ve traded my Guardian-and-Slashdot-focused daily browsing habits for reading gemlogs.

The associated drop in mental load has been an extremely welcome change.

No adverts, no worrying about the state of The World.

> I’m old enough to remember when the state of The World was only vaguely understood; news was more local, and only arrived daily anyway. How did we end up having to care about every single thing every second? Ah, yes—the web.

My most-read gemlogs so far are:

skyjake (author of Lagrange)

Idiomdrottning

but I must’ve read ten or twenty others too. I’m enjoying exploring. Here’s one particular post I liked by Lettuce:

You can’t do that (sit) in public

I haven’t emailed anyone to say “thanks” yet. I should do that.

Lagrange

Lagrange is the client I’ve settled on for browsing Gemini on Linux and Android.

It’s very aesthetically pleasing, and a big part of enjoying Gemini for me.

Writing

I guess my posts are a little more styled as “content” than “daily thoughts”. Is that good? Bad? I don’t think it matters too much. This is a low pressure place, I can write as I like.

There is a reason for my approach; fifteen years ago I wrote a daily webcomic. It was moderately popular—some thousands of daily uniques—and so I got used to producing and promoting “content”.

One thing I found immensely helpful was to establish an easy feedback channel for readers, and I’ve recreated that below with one click feedback links.

On my webcomic I displayed the feedback numbers as votes for/against, but that felt too far against the gemspace ethos. So for now the numbers are just for me.

One habit copied directly from my webcomic days is that I’m writing posts in advance and publishing exactly one per day. This makes the gemlog less authentic—but should be better for readers. People like regular content! Right?

It also means I’ll keep the quality of posts up by having a pool from which I can choose a post I like for the day.

Gemtext—

—is great. It hits exactly the right balance of simplicity and function for me.

The Protocol

As you may have guessed from the custom action clickies at the end of my posts, I’ve already played with the protocol a bit; I’m running a custom server.

Like Gemtext, the protocol seems to make a lot of sense. The lack of a referrer header is a big deal; it plays a critical part in the “promote your content” loop on the web. I don’t think I’ll miss it.

Simplicity. I like it!

Glossary

I’m probably mixing up terms all over the place. I think it’s supposed to be “geminispace”, but “gemspace” sounds better. How should it be capitalized? I’m not sure.

But I guess my meaning is clear enough, and I’ll gradually pick up the conventions.

Conclusions

Having fun so far, let’s see how it goes.

Feedback 📮

👍 Thanks!

👎 Not for me.

🤷 No opinion.

Comments.

So far today, 2024-05-13, feedback has been received 12 times. Of these, 0 were likely from bots, and 12 might have been from real people. Thank you, maybe-real people!