Comment by iamnothere
5 days ago
Have you looked into Gemini (the protocol)? Lots of people are expressing themselves there through text alone. And there’s a great culture of response-by-email that’s very reminiscent of the early (pre-blog) web.
Regardless, not all writers will write forever, not all writers have previously considered themselves as such. It’s good to reinvent yourself.
As for AI, the fear of bot scraping is something people are going to have to move past. AI training is ingesting almost all art regardless of medium. What are you going to do, abandon art to become an accountant? I suppose there is always live performance art. Cat’s out of the bag for everything else, though. Slop is slop, and it’s going to be around until we can’t make enough energy to churn it out anymore.
In the heyday of blogging, it was pretty common when interacting IRL with someone interested in a particular hobby or interest, to hear that they followed certain blogs that served as a locus for the community. I have never heard anyone IRL bring up Gemini the protocol. Not even once. So, again, someone posting on Gemini will probably find almost no audience compared to the old blogosphere.
I don’t think most of them are concerned about “audience”. There’s not even really a good way to get metrics on anything except page views. It’s very insular, kind of like the Bearblog community (although posts there occasionally leak into the broader world).
Not even sure what the point of linking to a Gemini post from the web is, since no major web browser can view Gemini.