Doing right by Gemini
Published on 2025-07-24
The other day while in a sort of after-work stupor I was laying on the couch when I thought "I wonder how my Gemini friends are doing." So I opened Lagrange and checked Antenna to learn that my Gemini friends are not, in fact, doing very well. A lot of them are gone and the ones that remain are lamenting about how far Gemini has fallen since its heights of 2022.
"Bored and Exhausted" (thread) by clseibold
"Fulfillment in Gemini" by Rob
"decline of the small web" by sbr
"I will stay on the small web" by fab
"Re: I will stay on the small web" by Jeff
"Notes on Community in Geminispace" by winter
One of the weird, almost hauntological feelings I get reading this discourse is that in a real sense I too am one of the people who's left. I still post on my gemlog from time to time but I'm very much out of the loop on the happenings in geminispace because I just don't come here very often. The only reason my gemlog keeps getting updated at all is because I have this incredibly cursed meta-static site generator that replicates all my posts across both protocols. If it wasn't for that, this capsule would appear dead for all intensive purposes.
I've met a number of people on the web who resent gemini, arguing that instead of building a new protocol, we should be building on the small web—that gemini is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've always thought the issue with that argument was that we weren't building a protocol so much as a community. Nominally there is a protocol, and it is technically interesting, but none of that really matters without people hanging out and doing cool things on geminispace. What matters is that we're having fun.
But it can be hard to have fun when there's so few of us left. I get that.
It does stand, however, that I still care about being in this space, and the only thing I can really do about that is make a personal commitment to get more involved. Indeed, I wrote about this the other month:
I was happier when I was on Gemini
I think my earlier thesis of "write more, be happier" was missing the point, though. It's a lot clearer to me now that I've had more time to think about it that being able to write every day was a byproduct of a very unique material condition in my life: I wasn't working, and I was only taking four classes at university. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I made the good choice to use that extra time to be creative. Ever since I've started working full time, that's gotten a lot harder, to the point that I can get out maybe one or two articles in a month.¹ I expect it'll get even harder once I'm back in school in the fall and I'm also working part-time; that's just what I need to do at this point.
This isn't meant to be an excuse, or an apology; after all, if I convince myself that I owe you the reader anything, doing this project just becomes too stressful for me to keep up with it.
What do I owe you as a writer?
This is more or less me trying to reaffirm my commitment to being in geminispace. That started earlier with me finally getting around to fixing all the broken links in my older posts after the first time I needed to rebuild my blog/gemlog database. Next up will probably be me fixing my curated posts page (again, after I rebuilt the database I wasn't able to rescue the tags; that's going to be tedious to fix…). After that, maybe I can try to pitch in on some gemini-based software. I've always kind of wanted to do it but most people around here don't build in languages I'm comfortable working in. Maybe I can change that.
Footnotes
¹ My internet presence setup is pretty fragile too, so that can cause a lot of issues. For example, a while back my computer's motherboard burnt out (RIP). I had no easily accessible backups of my website, and I was already so busy with everything else in life I basically just had to postpone my blog/gemlog indefinitely. Rinse and repeat a year later when my computer's hard drive cable stopped working. Fixing the problem was literally just a matter of taking the computer apart, pulling out the hard drive and copying the files, but at the end of every day I never felt up to it. That laptop is still sitting on my desk, half disassembled. One of these days I'll get around to fixing it god damn it. The thing is literally 14 years old at this point but I won't let it die
Respond to this article
If you have thoughts you'd like to share, send me an email!