Internet enshittification
In November 2022 Cory Doctorow first wrote about what he called the “enshittification” of Amazon. In January 2023 he provided the following definition:
… a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
In recent years I’ve been feeling the pinch of being the product and not the customer. I was mystified by how Facebook makes money showing me videos that make no sense, tired of YouTube’s exploration of exactly how much advertising I can tolerate, and fed-up with Reddit changing the iOS app interface seemingly day to day. I began longing for a refuge. My dissatisfaction with Reddit was exacerbated by them locking away my tech support comments in their proprietary system, vulnerable to being disappeared at any time, and taking much of my authorship value.
Angered and dismayed I vowed to change my habits, but didn’t see my way forward.
How monopoly enshittified Amazon
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
Gemini sounds cool, but how can I publish?
Not long after Geminispace was formed out of the void, I knew I wanted to give it a try. Gemtext spoke to me with its plain text format and formatting left to the client software. It had everything that WWW meant to me in 1995, but thoughtfully protected from the kind of expansive commercialization that spawned enshittification. A heady dose of nostalgia for a middle-aged man like me.
But, I didn’t just want to read, I wanted to publish. I looked to see if I could publish on my web hosting provider NearlyFreeSpeech.net, but they were adamantly focused on the HTTP protocol. Their single minded focus is what attracted me in the first place. In my searching I saw some mentions that the SDF Public Access UNIX System let you publish Gemtext and it intrigued me.
The time was not yet ripe
So I checked SDF out. It was so cool. Because I had been slowly returning to my command-line computing roots it was so very appealing. SDF was free to try before you buy, so to speak and I played with it for a few days. But things didn’t quite click for me. I got mixed-up in a way I’m not now able to understand and I couldn’t get things to work.
Clued in by what I had been reading, I went to an Interim computer festival, where I thought I might be able to find someone to help me, but it was crowded and I chickened out. I did see lots of neat old computer stuff though and I met a favorite retro-computer YouTuber of mine Adrian Black. I didn’t harvest any fruit that day, but I did plant a seed.
Find “SDF Gemini” at gemini://sdf.org/
[ SDF Public Access UNIX System .. Est. 1987 ]
The Interim Computer Museum Events
VCFPNW 2026, that sounds like fun
Geminispace remained on my mind. Enshittification continued apace. I still watched YouTube, still used Facebook to keep in touch with my mom, and still used Reddit as a venue to provide technical assistance. To be honest, I won’t ever quit the enshittified web cold turkey. But I felt bad about locking up material in Reddit’s proprietary dungeon, as meager as the content was.
Then Adrian Black said he was coming to Vintage Computer Festival Pacific North West in Tukwila Washington, practically in my own back yard. It would be like the Interim Computer Festival, but more so! I looked into the VCFPNW and saw they needed volunteers. I resolved to volunteer, then I would have to go, I couldn’t shy away from the meat-space socialization. This was a step in the right direction.
I volunteered. I didn’t chicken out. I went to set up on Friday afternoon and met some cool people, my kind of nerds who loved old computers and command-line culture. I was energized. These are the same people who run SDF, this is interesting.
Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest
Welcome to Super Dimension Fortress - This is how to publish!
I went home that night and signed up for SDF again. This time it made sense to me. Things worked for me. What was my problem before? I didn’t remember, and it didn’t matter. I read the FAQ and the help. I learned I could publish a capsule in Geminispace and was eager to begin.
Over the next two days I volunteered at VCFPNW 2026. I got energized and inspired by playing with hardware text terminals connected to a VAX. I played Tetris on a VT510 connected to an ancient Unix server. Then I went home and played with NetBSD ON SDF. I set up my Gemini space and started learning how to publish my first Gemini capsule, a quick rehash of my vanity website The Lazy M 8 Ranch.
SDF Gemini site setup, getting started
Find “The Lazy M 8 Ranch” at gemini://sdf.org/paulmccombs/
Inspiration
As I continued reading about Geminispace, I found some inspiration in the Project Gemini FAQ. Solderpunk described how to publish material first in Gemtext then also in HTML, and provided alternative methods to do so.
§2.9 I’m kind of on the fence about publishing in Geminispace…
If you like the sound of Gemini in principle and you’re tempted to set up a capsule but you’re worried that it’ll be a waste of time because you’ll only have a tiny audience compared to publishing on the web, or you don’t want to feel like you are excluding people who don’t know about Gemini yet or don’t want to use it, don’t despair! You can bihost your content in Geminispace and the web simultaneously
…
Both “teams” can see your content the way they presumably like best, and you can feel good about doing your individual part to make the average website a tiny bit less awful than the status quo.
Find “Project Gemini FAQ - §2 Getting started in Geminispace” at gemini://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-2.gmi
Project Gemini FAQ - §2 Getting started in Geminispace
The Future
Now that I’ve started journaling here at SDF, I hope to implement this plan:
- Write entries in Gemtext format first to publish here.
- Programmatically convert entries to publish in HTML at my existing blog, Tales of Wrangling Geodata.
- Convert my archive of old entries to Gemtext to publish here.
- When I contribute a worthwhile comment on Reddit, publish it here in Gemtext as well.
- Eventually create a publicly accessible archive of all my material in a central location.