Returning to gemspace
You're viewing a Gemini article on the web
It's much better to view it on Gemini!
Following the recent exodus of Twitter users to Mastodon, the Fediverse saw a lot of chatter from new users talking about the superiority of the Fediverse over other solutions. This reminded me somewhat of Gemini's popularity a couple of years ago, which saw a lot of users announcing their departure from the clear web to embrace Gemini full-time. I made a jokey post about it based on my experience with Gemini back in the day.
Remember when Gemini was the new hotness? That was fun.
To my surprise a few people piped up that not only is Gemini still alive and kicking, it's actually more populated than it was before. I'll admit it got me curious. I was pretty enthusiastic about Gemini back in the day, so I decided to give it another look. Let's just say: they weren't wrong.
What's changed?
From what I can see, the biggest change is the reduction in gemlogs exclusively talking about Gemini and its superiority as a protocol/platform. The thing that really put me off Gemini was the it ended up becoming nothing more than an in-crowd shouting about how great Gemini is *inside* Gemini. This gets boring fast. I was interested to see what people might actually *do* within the limitations of the Gemini protocol, but at the time it wasn't really forthcoming.
On my return this time, however, I have seen a huge reduction in this kind of posting. People seem to have actually settled into a rhythm of posting genuinely interesting or personal things on their gemlogs. In addition there are a lot more fantastic and interesting projects out there. For example:
Station: a Gemini social media platform
The Midnight Pub: a gathering ground for gemini users
Gemipedia: Wikipedia in Gemini
This is exactly the kind of thing I had been hoping to see originally: interesting uses of a lighter protocol that could give me a reason to come back to the Gemini space on a regular basis. It's really nice to see that this kind of thing has taken off.
What's not changed?
The other nice thing is that Gemini remains, well, limited. I'm happy to see that the developers haven't bowed to pressure to add more web-like features into the spec. We already have the web, so it would be redundant to ape it in Gemini.
Will I stay?
I decided not to re-upload my old gemlog, but instead to start a new one. It feels as good a time as any to start again and give Gemini a fresh chance. I've had a lot of fun the last few days just browsing through interesting posts and sites on gemspace and even introduced one of my non-technical friends to it. I'm a flaky person in general, so it's entirely possible that I'll stop using this again soon. But maybe I'll come back to it again.