re: why gemini is boring (codesoap)

=> gemini://rulmer.xyz/boring_gemini.gmi

And the circle is complete! There are two types of posts on gemini - tech posts, and people complaining about gemini!

I kid, but it's sorta true sometimes. I am not here to rag on the post, it's a very true post. Gemini is more than just smol hackernews! But I do feel there is something to say about how one uses gemini and what they get out of it.

gemini isn't just aggregators

Now, this isn't what codesoap has said (directly), but it has to do with how one uses Gemini. There are 3 main public aggregators - Capcom, Gmisub, and Antenna. Each of these provides different patterns for exposing content, Antenna being a "send me your content" feed. But feeds are simply "What was posted today".

These aggregators, and subscribing to folks gemlog indexes or atom feeds, only expose new content and not the vast (well relative) content that was posted since inception. A lot of folks have mirrored their content from gopher or http as well so you can get posts dating back well before gemini was created.

This is where a lot of those treasures are found. Sometimes this thought creeps into my head like "I wish there was more to read" but that's just because I'm not looking. So any time I come across someones page who I'm unfamiliar I click back or go up one link and see what else they've written! Sometimes that's where the non-tech stuff resides.

And spacewalk shows just capsule updates sorted by time - which can help discover some changes that didn't necessarily come from an atom feed!

gemini search is limited

This is VERY true for tech related things. So many search queries pull up EVERY SINGLE PAGE of an RFC that mentions the word. But for non-tech stuff I have minor success. Recipes for instance grabs quite a bit! So I probably should try using it more.

And I don't know how active medusae.space still is but that organizes stuff into groups which was really useful for finding content back when I found gemini.

conclusion/my final thoughts

I actually enjoy gemini because while search is limited, and the content has bounds, it's a pretty vast space if you start digging, and it's actually possible to find a lot of content out there. There's a lot of hello-world and deadlinks nowadays, but occasionally you'll find some place pretty dope.

I do appreciate codesoap's conclusion of "please post more diverse content! It's welcome!" rather than "this place is dead, leave, it's just harder to use hackernews" (like a certain ex-geminaut's post).

=> gemini://idiomdrottning.org/re-why-gemini-is-boring

bonus - my top of YEAR posts

I'll try and be better at posting more diverse content. The flaw of having a yearly wrap-up is I feel conflicting hyping up an album early. But I've been considering changing the format to where I can link out to individual album reviews for everything then use the top to just collate the things that I didn't find the excitement to make a standalone post - and to list which were my top 5 and which is the overall winner! Should keep me more honest with it!

And I'll be happy to share my bread recipe!

Links

The gemini homepage has links to everything I mentioned

=> gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/ | gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ | gemlog | home

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