This past week I spent a little bit of time interacting with people in Gemini.
I mostly spend time at the Station, or reading posts in the BBS - though I actually wrote a bit in there for the first time.
All my interactions on Gemini have been extremely positive: people have been kind to me, helpful, and the comments, even on Station (which has a smaller character limit) are always very well thought out and genuine.
In an effort to see if I can bridge my named Mastodon account and my BSKY account (both of these are sort of work related / attached to my real name), in a way that would let me post but prevent me from spending hours doom-scrolling, I installed Openvibe.
It is a great app, but the fact that it opens directly on two merged timelines made the scrolling worse.
The app also has a sort of federated generic "what's popular" timeline which grabs posts from all supported protocols, including nostr, and yeah, nostr is still mostly crypto-bros.
Another thing I found interesting is that I toyed with the "for you" timeline, adding topics that interest me, but the end result was kind of terrible since it mostly pulls posts using hashtags. I am a fan of tags for categorizing content, and the occasional #tag in a post to make it easier for people to find stuff is good. But most of what I saw is the excessive use of #tags and emojis typical of posts that are only written for engagement or to sell something. Garbage, basically.
I won't uninstall the app just yet, but it's definitely not helping me with avoiding the corporate web and cutting down doom-scrolling.
I did find a nice CLI tool to post to BSKY that I really liked and that I used a couple of times.
I think I'll write a script for cross-posting from the CLI using this tool and toot - this way I can update both *and* avoid the scrolling.
I already have a similar one for cross-posting to my main (non named) Mastodon and twtxt which I can use as a base. Though I don't know if I can be bothered to set up toot to work with the two different accounts.
© Melyanna. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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