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Everything is in the title… I will not update this gemlog any more, or only very occasionally. However, *everything* is in the title, and it doesn’t say that I’m stopping to update my capsule! Gemini is great, I just need to change my workflow.
Two months ago, when I finally had the time to recuperate the SSH-keys to tilde.club, I decided to continue my publication politics: at least one article by week, alternatively in English, French, and Esperanto.
My last article was more than a month ago.
And I begun it by asking for forgiveness, as I had not enough time to publish more than only a small part of a translation I’m doing into Esperanto of an article about Christianity and anarchism.
Obvious conclusion: I failed to follow my politics, again.
I wasn’t inactive on Gemini during this month, however. In April, I used Lagrange and Amfora every day to read Antenna and Cosmos, to connect on Astrobotany, and:
and I also begun a long essay in English on why I’m Christian.
I decided to impose myself the one-article-a-week discipline with one hope: as I *had* to publish things, my creativity would flourish. But I realized this month that my creativity flourished *outside* this discipline, and perished *inside* it. It’s obviously a bad idea —for me at least.
But why was it? Two articles that I read during April gave me a clue. One by Ploum, and one by Josias. I would like to thank them here.
Ploum is a Belgian author and engineer, which thought a lot about technology and its effects on people. I don’t agree with him all the time, but he is always interesting and thought-provoking. He is well-known in Gemini I presume as the developper of Offpunk, an offline-first smolnet browser. I like to read his blog (mostly in French) and his capsule quite often.
If he develops Offpunk, it’s because, since the beginning of the year, he tries to live disconnected, only synchronizing his mails and sites once a day. That way, he is still linked to the world, and still does a lot of things on/thanks to the Internet, but he is giving the pace. He controls his online life (that’s how I’d resume his goal, but he may use other words, I encourage you to read him).
I, too, want to control my digital life. I’m not as advanced as him, thus, from time to time, when he explains the steps he already passed, I kind of recognize the stage I’m right now. It occurred very strongly when I read this blog post (in French):
In this blog post (and fifth chapter of his oncoming book), he describes that the joys of exploration, of finding new and interesting things to read takes so much place on the Internet, “thanks” to the fact that new things are available permanently, that we finally do nothing with what we learn, if the intense excitation of our brain let us learn anything. Learning nothing or almost, our brains are still too occupied to create anything. That’s why he decided, a few years ago, to disconnect from news sites and social medias for a few months.
Did he stop to search for new things all the time? No. He just replaced small and uninteresting things with longer and more interesting ones. It’s, in my book, already a great victory, but he stayed very passive. And if he learnt more things, his brain was still not free enough to be creative.
That’s more or less where I’m now. I ditched Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, never used any other social media. I (successfully) try to limit greatly the reading of small news articles, and read only trusted and serious sources. I read longer articles, more interesting ones generally, but I saw that I do now with Antenna and Station exactly what I did with Twitter: I refresh compulsively the page to see if something new was published. And whatever I do, if something appears, I stop it to read the new publication directly. It’s far better than Twitter, especially because there are only a handful of new things by day, but I’m not cured. And that doesn’t let me enough time to write other things than reactions (I wanted to do that a few times in April, but resisted as my previous English post was already a reaction).
A second article made me think about my use of Gemini, but this time from a writer point-of-view. Josias, the author of the capsule josias.dev, wrote a rich essay about long-form content on Gemini:
I could take this article, and comment it paragraph by paragraph, as it rings a lot of bells in me. But that would be tiring for you, so I’ll just stop to this one:
> Whenever I sit down to write, like with this post, I want to write something fulfilling that will inspire others or let them see the topic differently than before. I don't want to just share what I've been doing or a vague opinion. That's really not that interesting.
I’m not sure if I write for me or for the others. Probably both (or I wouldn’t publish at all, even less in English). Anyway, vague opinions, explained quickly are not what I want to write. I’m not a professional writer, it’s hard for me to write, especially when I do it in English, a language I will probably never speak acceptably. I need time, time to process, time to think, time to organize, time to correct, time to re-think and re-organise and re-write and re-correct. I just can’t do that every week. I want to be proud of me and preferred to write nothing than to write bad things.
But it’s not only a question of time. It’s a question of freedom. Gemlogs are organized to be easily findable. There are tools like Antenna and Cosmos to ensure that authors could find each other’s articles, to ensure visibility. And they do their work admirably.
Antenna/Cosmos are great. But they tend to normalize the Geminispace. Others probably resist these sirens easily, I know I can’t. If I stop my gemlog, I’ll stop to publish things on Antenna, and who know what would be born? Just like my Tinylog in Volapük, things crazy and useless, things that no one would read (I however received a mail from a fellow Volapükist, so it’s not perfectly *no one*). But things I would like, and would be proud of. Like I said, I don’t know if I write for me or others. If no one find my capsule, then so be it. But what I would have published would be mine.
So, it’s the end of Adou’s gemlog, more or less. I will still read other’s gemlogs, and if I think I had something to say, I will probably use Station for that. I like the gemlogs and the ability to answer, but it’s just not for me as an author.
Now the main part will be in tilde.club/~adou and no more in tilde.club/~adou/gemlog. My new objective is to publish around twice a year, but longer things. I already have the translation of *Anarchie et christianisme* into Esperanto, and my “Christianity 101” article to finish. It seems that I want to write things about Christianity; it’s logical, considering the importance of my religion in my life. I liked to limit the amount of religion-related posts, but now I write for myself; however I have a lot of other interests I would like to write about, and think I can handle correctly (history, philosophy, politics, …). I will probably rewrite my guide to the Gemini-server Agate, adding the security advices I received, but as I’m not competent in informatics, I will probably not post a lot about this subject. I will continue to “Geminize” the histories of Kalon. And I will continue my Tinylog in Volapük.
The things I did in my gemlog, that is, publish quick thoughts and reactions, will continue on Station. It’s a great place for that, but I’ll limit my visits. Maybe I’ll use Gemini only with Offpunk? And if I *need* to write a gemlog post, I’ll let myself all freedom to do exactly what I want to at the moment I want to. It’s my capsule, after all.
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Author: Adou (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Subject: About the Gemlog
Date: 2022/05/03
Fuck fascists.
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