gemini://tilde.pink/~scumware/gemlog/2022-10-11.gmi

So recently I've been considering finding another way to host my Gemini capsule, or perhaps even switching over to Gopher. This primarily came about because my capsule's URL is a real mouthful, isn't it? Four parts of the URL? Man oh man. And I thought three was pushing it. Anyway, really my only needs are the following:

Yeah, you heard me. Yestercities feels like a complete wasteland when you look at the list of capsules. As of checking right now, the top 12 capsules in the list are either empty or simply link to the user's profile on the WWW. One is just blatantly disrespectful to indigenous cultures as well. Anyway what exactly is the point of having a Gemini capsule if you're just gonna link back to the Web? You'd be better served using a Carrd or Linktree if you're essentially using an obscure protocol as a landing page.

I really don't mean to sound like a dick or a gatekeeper or anything, but it's just not fun. Obviously, this is one of the problems with free page building services. Especially on something like Gemini. You get people signing up for the novelty of it all and then abandoning the page shortly after because of it. At least on something like Neocities you have featured pages, but there is nothing of the sort on Yestercities or some similar services like smol.pub. I would have liked to join one of the Circumlunar Space PubNIXes but the one I was interested in joining is full up at the moment. So uh. That sucks. So, in the meantime, I'm still seeking out other options. Truthfully, my best option is probably hosting it myself, but I'm lazy as hell and don't want to learn any more complicated server nonsense at this particular juncture. But yeah, as of now I'm sticking with Yestercities, though I have some gripes.

The main problem I have with Yestercities in particular is that there really is no community. Obviously, there is the Yesterweb - but that's just it. Yester-WEB. I have poked my head into the community before - as far as I can tell, they only have a Discord server - but I just wasn't that interested in it. For one thing I don't use Discord all that often outside of communicating with friends. I find the organization of servers tedious. And second, there isn't really much going on in the section ABOUT Gemini. You've really just got the same couple people in the chat and some people popping in wondering what they should do. This is more a problem of Gemini sill being a young protocol than anything else, but it's kind of wack when the only community spaces in the Yestersphere are served over HTTP. Yestercities doesn't even have its own sidebar button on the Yesterweb site, and I had to do some digging in the Discord just to figure out how to get the WebDAV working. The ywcafe capsule is a start, but yeah, still an experiment says the host.

Anyways, I might be too harsh on Yestercities. If you'd like to see some more cool pages from the community, I recommend checking out the following capsules. They are (fairly) actively updated and have some interesting stuff within.

Hopefully we can get some more increased traffic and focus on beefing up the support for alternate network protocols in the Yesterweb community. In the meantime, I will be shifting my focus elsewhere in the future. Also I'm going to try and flesh out my link directory, since there are plenty more cool capsules out there in the wild. Maybe I'll even include sections for Gopher and Spartan spaces as well. Who knows?