The occasional geminer - an artisanal, handcrafted gemlog

Winding down my Gemini engagement

Well it’s been a fun ride but I’m going to wind down my Gemini presence. I made it about 6 months.

I’ve been a vocal critic of parts of Gemini, but I wanted to make a good-faith effort to see what it was, not just snipe from outside. [1], [2].

While I have had a lot of fun on the technical side of things, and found a certain freedom in expression that was lacking from my old blog, the negatives outweigh the positives.

In the spirit of “2 pluses, 1 minus” or the “shit sandwich”, here’s a summary.

The good, part 1

Gemini has taken off! There’s a largish community and a bit of a “buzz”. This is frankly not very common and people should be proud.

The bad

First off, a lack of textual expression in gemtext. This is something I’ve butted heads with the community, and it’s not gonna change. Fine, but it turns out it’s a dealbreaker.

A lack of audience reach. This is not just vanity publishing for me. Despite the choice of really quite decent clients, I cannot simply share a Gemini link without having to preface it with “oh yes this is a new protocol please download this to read”.

I’m not really being that interested in discussing the things the community likes discussing - the evils of the Big Web, the tired rehashings of open source dogma I went through in the late 90s, and more. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m old.

Finally, I’m not on board with the virtue signalling of not using “normie” social media, and I still see Gemini as an attempt at a technical solution to a social problem.

The good, part 2

It’s been fun interacting with a small enthusiastic community. Members like Sandra (Idiomdrottning)[3] and Björn (ew0k)[4] have their hearts in the right place and are all-around menschs. The IRC channel on tilde.chat is welcoming too. And Lagrange[5] is an amazing client.

I’m taking from this a new focus on short-form blogging in the form of a new microblog.[6] It’s refreshing to have all the affordances of HTML to express myself, but at the same time I don’t have to be so damn formal about it.

I wish the Gemini community all the best!

—-

[1] Gemini: the misaligned incentives

[2] TLS and its discontents

[3] Idiomdrottning

[4] ew0k’s Antenna project

[5] Lagrange

[6] microblog

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✽ Sunday, 2022-05-22

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