Overthinking the apocalypse

I never look at photos on the web.

I mean I do look at photos on the web in the sense that everyone does, but I don't look at, like, photography. I used to be into photography, like, a million years ago. Did lomo on film, street, DIY porn. I've long abandoned the hobby, but nowadays many people in my contacts are into it and post photos regularly. Somehow looking at their photo rolls feels demanding, like reading poetry. I briefly glance at one or two pictures in their photo threads, then skip to the next post in my endless social media feed.

On the geminispace (that’s kind of a retro web, simpler and more text-based, today quite niche) I stumbled on a wistful Japanese photo blog. => gemini://higeki.jp/

Because of the way gemini works, a gallery has to be a list of links, necessarily each on a separate line marked by an arrow (like the link above). A gallery is just text. You only see the images after you click a link, there’s no inline images. higeki, whoever they are, titles each photo link with a word. 散歩。グリーンカラー。梅ちゃん。 “walk”. “green colour”. “plum-chan” (that’s their cat). They’re organised by day, and the link to each daily gallery also gets a single-word title. “prayer”. “tea”. “beneath”.

I don't understand why I look at these photos when I wouldn’t look at the same photos on a website. Is it the plainness of the gemtext format, the lack of distraction? Is it nostalgia appeal? Is it for lack of options in geminispace, just the fact that it's a small community with few people in it? Is the absence of an infinite scroll media feed? Like many gemini authors, higeki has a web version of the same content (https://higeki.jp/ ). That necessarily introduces webdesign. The design has the same wistfulness that their gemini area emanates from text and structure alone, but visually. Even though I like the design, I don’t think that’s an improvement. I like that the date is shown in Japanese vertical text, something hard to do in gemtext format. The latest photos show inline in the opening page. I dislike that somehow.

I catch myself wondering if the web version is generated from the gemtext, or the other way around, irrationally feeling that the second alternative would be less cool. I do notice that higeki has a guestbook on the gemini capsule, and no guestbook in the webpage.

Somebody in gemini made a daily image aggregator, Picture Pages (gemini://freeshell.de/picpages/ ). “I've seen lots of people posting images in Geminispace, and I wanted to draw more attention to them. Every day for a year, I'm adding a page of five randomly chosen images.” These have even less context; the creator didn’t add functions to copy the photographer’s original title. The aggregator concept seems unthinkable in the web, you’ll only get AI slop and ads and porn and every so often a shock photo etc. (Or maybe the real reason it’s unthinkable is, who wants to look at a selection of random pictures when there’s so much more #engaging #content everywhere). Here I only see amateur daily photography and photos of tech gadgets. I spot one of higeki’s photos by the URL. It's a bowl of misoshiru. いいなぁ、あったかい。。。 I wonder if it's cold in Japan, too; I wonder how higeki, this perfect stranger, is doing.

I cannot explain why photo galleries in the web feel so demanding and tiresome to me, but in gemini I am happy to click these random photos. Anticipating it, even.

“There's no filter on the images, so it's possible that something offensive might come up”, says the author of Picture Pages. “If you see anything that should be removed, or if you want your own images removed, let me know.” There’s no obvious way to let them know; presumably you have to look at the url, try out the base domain (gemini://freeshell.de ), and look for an email address. (My assumption is correct.) That’s the report button: talk to the creator about it. Very geminicore.

Taking a break from the Information Superhighway—all high-speed lanes by now, you dodging giant trucks spewing fumes, there’s no footpath anymore—to reach this little camp by bicycle. A handful of nerds each in a DIY tent, putting up stands in something of a convention atmosphere. Many of the stands have been left unattended, mine included, but they’re still there. It is quiet.

Many people host their own gemini logs on minimalistic hardware like a Raspberry Pi microcomputer in their living room (it is much less demanding than web hosting). So some people tag image links with the size, so you know in advance if it’s a large photo that may take a while to download on your link. Daily Picture Pages does not add this information. Even if it did, you don’t know the speed of the link. Sometimes I click on a picture that’s a few MiB in size and it loads slowly. I watch the download counter over three or four seconds, 1M… 2M… 3M… In my imagination I think it’s somebody’s homeserver, uploading the photo over a domestic Internet connection. The picture loads. It’s a photo of a flowing river over pebbles, or maybe the Sea? (gemini://librehacker.com/gemlog/starlog/img/2023/chs_20230820a.jpg ). The photographer used a long exposure time so the flow in time spreads over the bidimensional space of the photo. I notice I have a very old feeling, one I have forgotten was possible: a feeling of wonder at Internet technology, wonder that someone (Christopher) somewhere in a different continent (Alaska) took a photo of a river and I am able to see it on my computer thanks to the index made by a third, unrelated person (jbanana from England). It is a wonder that is brought not from the technology itself but from the fact that there is a link between human beings: me, jbanana, Christopher, higeki. There is no like button, no comment thread. If I don’t write something in higeki’s guestbook or send jbanana an email they’ll never know I was looking at their stuff. One puts their stuff out there and hopes someone one day will have seen it, like messages in a bottle you send into the Sea.

I tried writing a gemini capsule once, but quickly abandoned it. I did not take it offline, though. It's still floating there somewhere, like the space capsules that inspired the name “gemini” for this software. The other day I was asking people in the fediverse whether they have any favourite geminispace spot, and someone told me: yours. “I often go to your recipes page when I want to make something with potatoes.” I didn’t even remember I had put some recipes on gemini. I haven’t made my own potato recipes in a good while. You never know what will connect to someone and how.

I like the geminispace quite a bit. Wish there was more women writing in it, more writing in languages other than English, more writing on topics that are not tech. But the community is alright. I dread at the fact that I almost wrote: “is alright so far”. Is any decent online community fated to decay as it grows? Is “decency” impossible to scale? I don’t think that’s quite correct; growth brings challenges but some of it is on the merits and demerits of the technology. (The fediverse is significantly more decent than commercial social media for the same reason indigenous communities are more decent than States of comparable population: decentralised federation). I feel like gemini is a better technology than the web, by virtue of being a worse technology than the web. The way it constrains you prevents many issues. And even if at some point it grows so much it becomes bad—or, the other alternative, fizzles out with disinterest and becomes moribund, like its predecessor and inspiration, gopher—it would have been worth it because it’s like, already a thing. We are experiencing its lifespan, right now, this morning. One lesson that anarchism has taught us: it is better to have a good community for a while and then let it die when it becomes too big or too small or too toxic, than trying to make your community “succeed” and grow eternally no matter the cost. Living things are born and grow and age and die. The geminispace is alive; you can access it right now with a gemini browser and do things with it; this morning, I look at photos on gemini pages; look, this one is from a Russia domain; the filename implies January 2013; it is a blurry digital photo of Legos, somebody’s memories of a time before Donbas, before Maidan, maybe…