# RE: On stagnation and burnout in the Gemini community

solderpunk recently wrote some thoughts down regarding the
current state of the gemini community[1]. I have a few
thoughts of my own to add to the mix. None of them very
BIG or important. Just little things.


For starters, you may notice that I am writing this on
gopher, not gemini. There are a few reasons for that. I,
like many of us in Circumlunar Space and on gopher in
general, was kicking ideas around with solderpunk and
others about gemini before it was gemini. I was very
excited about it. I liked the idea of making something
new and being there for a birth, having missed so very
many births in computer science, tech, the internet,
etc. The Bell Labs days or Parc were long behind us.
There was a lot of appeal and joy and fun in being a
part of something new and cool.

Gemini solved a simple problem, that is only a problem
for some folks: gophermaps suck. They do. I get where
they come from and the history, but they are just not
nice to work with. Add to that the fact that they are
really designed just for menus, and that info lines
are, themselves, a sort of hack. So for me, the big
things that gemini provided are:

A. Regular URL/URI with no "gophertype"
B. A better text markup system (gemtext) that is both
   menu and document at the same time

I, for the most part, do not care about client certs,
TLS, etc. I do not really care much about "apps". I
firmly fall into the camp that wants distributed
community via long(ish)-form writing. Gopher does this
for me, if a little clunkily.

So that leads to the idea of stagnation or burnout and
how I may contribute to this phenomenon. I built a client
and a bunch of frontends to apis or other web services, as
well as an aggregator (spacewalk). I did all of this on
rawtext.club (RTC). RTC had a server crash with total
data loss. When a new server was spun up, we lost a lot
of users and a lot of the very active development
community that was there. Folks don't chat much anymore.
I don't get e-mails from other users much anymore. The
gemini and gopher servers are up, but I never started
using them again, never rebuilt. It just wasn't much of
a loss for me. If anything, it meant I no longer got
e-mails all the time asking me to change/fix this or
that.

Couple that with the fact that the main folks I was
wanting to interact with on gemini were the people that
I interacted with on gopher. Many of them tried gemini
for a bit and went back to gopher. I, in the end, did
the same. It has been so long since I really browsed
around gemini. It was only by chance that I was bored
and went to the zaibatsu "recent updates" over gemini,
having already gone to the gopher "recent updates", and
saw solderpunk's post.

I think gemini is great. I do. I really really love
gemtext and am glad we didn't just go with markdown. I
think gemtext is a great format in its own right. I
think what I really want is gopher to have a gemtext
type and have the majority of extant clients support
that type. I would have been happy enough with that.

Maybe I need to re-explore geminispace. It has been a
long while. I wonder what I will find. I wonder how I
will find it. It, like the web, feels empty to me in a
way that gopher isn't. I often get out my computer, go
to firefox and realize there is nothing I want to see,
nothing I want to do. I check hacker news, check my
e-mail, once a week I check text only npr news. I may
or may not check the weather report... that is about it.
I am not on any social things, I do not generally use
sites that you need an account for... even for shopping
or the like. I have a few bills on autopay, but that is
about it. So my use of gemini may reflect my general
decline in use of the web. I use nicotine to connect
to soulseek or transmission to torrent things on
occasion, but even that is pretty rare.

I DO use one "app" on gemini. It used to be called
spellbinding, but now seems to be called stack[2]. It
is a word game in the style of "Spelling Bee" (NYT).
My wife and I play it most days. I see the same names
on the leaderboard and feel connected in a sort of
abstract way. Sometimes I go weeks without playing,
but it is there when I come back. I think this may
speak to solderpunks comment about "apps" that take
a few minutes and can be left alone for extended
periods of time.

I did try out the BBS[3]. It is very very well made. In
the end I found I just did not want that kind of 
interaction in my life. I don't need it and it does
not do anything positive for me. It is a technical
achievement to make it work on gemini. It works so
so well. But it just isn't what I am looking for. I
wonder if others feel that way? Or if maybe they just
have not found their way to these "apps". Or maybe
usage of these "apps" reduces other interactions in
the space in favor of the walled garden approach?

Either way: I have been using and checking gopher,
but not gemini. I don't know if this is a permanent
condition for me or not. Time will tell. At the very
least I should do a walk around and see what is new
in geminispace. Even my gophering is pretty limited.
I really like a few phlogs (< 10) and enjoy reading
them when they put up new stuff (which is not very
often). I like that christina's 5 questions have
continuted to be a thing. I just don't think I want
a whole lot of stuff on the computer these days and
drastically prefer e-mail if I am going to do stuff
on the computer.

Well, I don't know how much any of that adds to the
conversation I attempted to be a part of. Hopefully
there is something either interesting or valuable
in there.



Links:

 1. gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/on-stagnation-and-burnout-in-the-gemini-community.gmi
 2. gemini://tilde.team/~stack/game
 3. gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/