The anti-marketing aspect of the Gemini network

And why your niche should stay a niche

I like Gemini. Not the Google Chatbot but the network that existed before Google named its product. If you are enough of a geek, you may want to give it a try.

• Creating a Blog in Gemini:// (brennan.day)

Eoin is counting the number of "capsules" on the Gemini network. A capsule is the equivalent of a "website" on the Web or a "hole" on Gopher. It’s a personal space, a bunch of pages. Blogs become "gemlogs".

Eoin’s first observation is that the number of active capsules is slowly growing. The network is healthy.

But his second observation is really interesting: there’s absolutely no correlation between the number of new capsules in a given month and articles about the Gemini protocol being promoted on the first page of Hacker News.

• Counting Capsules (spool-five.com)
• same content but on the Web

This is a confirmation of what I’ve benn trying to explain for years: your metrics and web statistics are completely useless. The number of visitors, the number of clicks are worthless if you are not a marketer trying to extract money from a big brand. They don’t mean anything.

By the way: you should really avoid Hacker News these days. The front page is heavily manipulated to promote pro-AI stuff and bury everything that might question wether fascism-capitalism is good.

• Why is Hacker News like that? (drewdevault.com)

A Mozilla employee is leaving after 15 years and comes to a similar conclusion. Mozilla is awesome because it has always been abnormal. It is mostly used by abnormal people. This means that hiring "normal managers" who try to make it "normal" and chase "normal" metrics is, of course, a recipe for failure.

• jr conlin's ink stained banana (blog.unitedheroes.net)

I always failed to understand those marketing people who try to be "like others but a bit cheaper". While all the value is being different enough to nurture your own niche.

I completely removed statistics from my blog in 2013. At the time, I had a very strong realisation that the blog posts that mattered most, those I was proudest of, and those that prompted people to mail me even years later all had mediocre statistics.

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web (ploum.net)

On the contrary, most of my hit, my "buzz", were quickly forgotten. But, being addicted to statistics, I was unconsciously adapting my writing style to improve those numbers. I was scrolling through social media posts that were highly popular while trying to create some myself.

Closing my social media accounts and, instead, procrastinating on Gemini had the opposite effect: making me read other ideas without caring about reactions, about popularity. Jsreed5 made the same observation while he was trying the Nostr protocol. While Nostr’s technicalities may be interesting by themselves, the content on it is similar to the one found of mainstream social networks. And our smolnet Gemini-formatted brains cannot take it anymore!

• A Geminaut's View of Nostr (jsreed5.org)

We really need a simple Gemini hosting provider that would also provide a Web version, to welcome less technical-minded people who still may want to access a quieter, non-commercial, out-of-time virtual space.

Lot of people are trying Gemini and find that there’s no content on it, that they can’t have their news and dopamine hit on it. Well, that’s exactly the point.

• There Is No Content on Gemini (ploum.net)

The fact that only a niche minority want to use it is also part of the point. Gemini might no be for you. That’s fine. The modern Web and even the real world (where every device is actively working against me and every human interaction seems to be about AI) is increasingly not for me. So let me have my strange niche space.

Ici le vert provient de l’absorption et l’émission spectrale de la lumière par leurs constituants, là où normalement les étoiles ont une couleur qui provient seulement du rayonnement thermique de l’astre (rayonnement de corps noir).

Le rayonnement thermique est toujours là ici, et il est jaune-blanc, mais l’étoile, très riche en sodium, absorbe des parties non-négligeables des longueurs d’onde jaunes. Il reste donc tout du blanc, sauf le jaune, soit une dominante verte.

L’origine de la couleur n’est donc pas la même que celles dont on a l’habitude.
C’est la même distinction entre la couleur d’un fer chauffé (rouge, orange, jaune, blanc…) et celle d’une flamme de gazinière ou de feu d’artifice.