Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated

I've seen posts here and there talking about how Gemini and Geminispace is dying, and I dunno, I have seen some capsules go offline but there's still a fair bit of activity. Of course, I tend to check places like BBS, tootik and Midnight.pub which are more social places, I have individual gemlogs in my feeds that I check, and I have some favourite games on Gemini that I come back to. Some capsules are gone, but plenty of them are still around. I mean, parts of my capsule were offline for a while before I got them running again.

What's your take? Dying, thriving, or somewhere in between?

Jul 11 · 5 months ago · 👍 aRubes, hyperreal, SavaRocks

12 Comments ↓

I really hope this is just the beginning

websites die on http also so capsules going offline shouldn't be an issue.

You can get an idea of the death rate here:

Plenty to mourn, but it doesn't look to me like a mass die-off.

(Note that a fair few of these have since come back to life)

@mbays exactly - out of that list, i note that auragem, spellbinding and the go docs are now back up at different addresses. i feel like the biggest casualty lately is locrian.zone as they had a lot of links in the list.

I think its just the fact Gemini its not trending anymore. The boom faded.

@Nexy a community is already here. If we keep things alive other will join

it's live and kicking. i am more afraid about losing one of the central services : BBS, Antenna, Lagrange, TLGS etc.

I’ll be back soon. The node hosting my server went toast and it’s been two days while they get new hardware. Hoping for no data loss but if there is it isn’t the end of the world.

I’ll be launching a new HTTP to Gemini proxy that converts webpages using Mozilla’s Readability.js before doing the gemini conversion so should be more focused reading. Navigation gets nuked, but the point of an HTTP proxy IMO is to make linked documents accessible, not as a jump off point to explore the web.

Planning to also integrate it into my Gem2Browser instance.

I don't think it's dying, but it's not exactly thriving. There was a peak and now it seems to be plateauing. I'm just guessing really. My guess is based only on what I've been seeing on the Antenna feed -- seems to be roughly about the same people posting.

Well, things have changed since I joined, which is about a year and a half ago. A few big and well-loved sites have shut down, like konpeito, geminispace.info, spam.works, medusae.space, and others, and that does feel like a significant loss for the community. Others have stepped in and there is a lot of new content that may not quite match what was there before, but it is there. The biggest issue with that, I feel, is that a lot of people either don't post frequently or don't advertise or engage with others freequently on the social parts of Geminispace, so what they post may not get noticed. Dunno.

I don't know that Antenna is a good metric since it depends on people building things to work with Antenna and telling Antenna to use it.

I know I've never used it and don't use RSS in anything I make.

You're right. It's not a good metric. There's way more to geminispace than one can see on Antenna.

I've just stumbled upon gemini recently if anyone is interested in the thoughts of a new user. I don't know what the activity level used to be like. I definitely see a lot of dead links. But dead links exist even on the web. I think for the kind of project Gemini is aiming to be, it doesn't need to have speedy growth. I know I'd rather browse though a slower feed of interesting content than a flood of spam and reposts and hype. I really like the experience I've had with Gemini so far. I hope to put up my own capsule at some point, but it might take me a while. In the mean time I'm slowly exploring what's already here. I plan on sticking around.