Support the Gemini protocol (kinda like gopher but new)

luetage

@ruarí Eh, the only thing I found was a comment of your’s on some gopher blog from 2008…

Ruarí

@luetage Sounds plausible. Every few years I go for a little trip around gopherspace, to remind myself how it used to be and see how things are going.

luetage

By the way… I just got notice from Ariane, which is the Gemini client I’m using on Android, that they will halt development of the client, remove all 3rd party code from the project, rename it and release a paid version. Ariane wasn’t that great to begin with, but the other Android clients are even worse. At this point you almost have to switch to Termux and start using a command line client. Anyway, as mentioned before, in my opinion it would make sense to try and introduce a Gemini client in Vivaldi for Android first. There isn’t much competition.

Ruarí

@luetage That's a shame.

By the way I searched for your username on gemini://geminispace.info and found nothing. No capsule or gemlog for you (or you have another identity)?

luetage

@ruarí Yeah, other handle. But I don’t have much content and the raspberry I’m running it on is down half the time. It’s more of a testing thing at this point. I do plan to get this going though. Maybe I’ll just go the sourcehut route and host the stuff there.

Ruarí

@luetage I too have just been playing around. I read about Gemini some time back, maybe a similar period to when @WildEnte started this thread.

I had thought about using Gopher (or now Gemini) for ~~blogging~~ phlogging/gemlogging in the past because of the (engineering) simplicity of those kinds of setups. Both in terms of generating content and should I want to self host. The downside would be the extremely limited audience, due to the unusual protocol.

Historically, I always used to have a personal blog (firstly on my.opera and when that died I later used a paid blog hosting service that pushed Markdown for content creation). Again, using something like Markdown was nice because it meant that you could knock something up fast and easily and didn't feel pressured to spend a lot of time tweaking presentation. This kind of self imposed limitation appeals to me. You even see this to an extent in microblogging services like Twitter. The barrier to "write something" is small because you don't have to do much, just copy down your thoughts.

At some point though I just kind of let the last blog expire as I felt I was not using it enough, so I stopped paying. Since that time the kind of thoughts I might put into a 'blog' have been kind of scattered on various services, much of it Github gists or Twitter threads but sometimes other places, e.g. I have a couple of things you might consider "blog posts" on my Strava account.

The problem with this scatter approach, is that it is very hard to locate something you wrote before because it could be in any number of places and one of the things I liked about a blog is that I could either link to them or sometimes just copy and paste snippets of them when having conversations on similar topics elsewhere online.

Recently (three days back), I put up a tiny bit of content on Gemlog Blue as a test. So far it has been tweaked, reposts of stuff I have said on Twitter, Github and parts of a splintered conversation (with several different people) on Slack but already I see some value. I was able to flesh out and reorganise my thoughts (Twitter threads are too limited sometimes) and now I have those 3 'articles' in one place (plus an intro post). I don't really imagine many people will find and read them because of the 'limited audience' on Gemini but there is still some value. Firstly I started to notice that as much as anything posting them is 'for me', so that I can go back over my thinking, or clarify my thoughts in my head during the process of writing. I guess in much the same way people have kept diaries. Also it still gives me a place I can copy snippets of ideas from and if I really wanted to link someone to an entire posting, I could always give them a link through a Gemini-to-web proxy service (since we are not at a stage where we could expect many people to have a Gemini client installed).

I am not sure that gemlog blue is where I would want to host long term though. It is just a free gemlog hosting service and it could easily disappear in much the same way my.opera did. Again another appeal of Gemini is the simplicity of self hosting but I figured I would start there as a test/trial and just move stuff if and when I decide that this is something I might want to do again going forward.

P.S. I realise now that I have given you more than enough information to find my little test gemlog but that is OK it is not secret and it is probably pretty dull to anyone but me . Also, these are just variants of things I have already posted publicly anyway. Anyway, I am still confused how you did not find me in the first place. I find myself immediately via a name search on gemini://geminispace.info

luetage

@ruarí Well, my search term was unicyclegeek1337 and I expected to get a hit. Not my fault But ok, got it now

Ruarí

@luetage unicyclegeek1337 could have been the one other guy I found who has writes a gemlog and likes unicycling.

gemini://gemini.straybits.org/2021/0328_why_unicycle.gmi

luetage

@ruarí Your capsule is already very nice. The only thing it desperately requires is an atom feed so all your fans can access your content asap. In my opinion Antenna gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ is a good way to get recognition. It’s a continuous stream of capsule feeds and I stumble upon some interesting content there every now and then.

And before I forget to mention it, I like the concept of Station. It’s Gemini’s twitter equivalent without the garbage and hate. Worth taking a look ☛ gemini://station.martinrue.com/.

WildEnte

@ruarí I actually did that search but the search results didn't look relevant (too used to the regular web?) I just didn't think of clicking through all (... wow, 3! ...) search results

You wrote quite a lot in a few days. Recycled? (pun intended)

Ruarí

@wildente said in Support the Gemini protocol (kinda like gopher but new):

You wrote quite a lot in a few days. Recycled?

It is somewhat recycled but everything was tweaked/updated. In addition I have written a couple more now that entirely new (albeit just as dull).

Ruarí

@luetage said in Support the Gemini protocol (kinda like gopher but new):

The only thing it desperately requires is an atom feed so all your fans can access your content asap.

I was almost tempted to self host as it was not obvious how I could setup an atom feed from Gemlog Blue but in the end I decided to move to Flounder (gemini://ruario.flounder.online/), which was both easier than self hosting and is more powerful.

Again Gemlog blue's limitations meant proper redirects were not something I could see how to setup, so I just redid all the pages so that they point to their Flounder equivalents.

luetage

@ruarí Already subscribed hours ago ^^

Ruarí

@luetage Hey… how did you find that so fast? From my manual redirects or a search?

luetage

@ruarí I followed your redirect.

Ruarí

@luetage Ok, well at least I know those work!

Ruarí

@luetage said in Support the Gemini protocol (kinda like gopher but new):

By the way… I just got notice from Ariane, which is the Gemini client I’m using on Android, that they will halt development of the client, remove all 3rd party code from the project, rename it and release a paid version. Ariane wasn’t that great to begin with, but the other Android clients are even worse. At this point you almost have to switch to Termux and start using a command line client. Anyway, as mentioned before, in my opinion it would make sense to try and introduce a Gemini client in Vivaldi for Android first. There isn’t much competition.

Well there might be 'soon'

gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-12_lagrange-meets-a-green-robot.gmi

WildEnte

@Ruarí is that to say the race is on with Vivaldi?

luetage

@ruarí Sounds like he doesn’t particularly care for Android…

Ruarí

@wildente said in Support the Gemini protocol (kinda like gopher but new):

@Ruarí is that to say the race is on with Vivaldi?

No traction or interest thus far (outside of my own). I think, right now, our resources are a bit stretched.

But… this is Vivaldi… never say never!