(un)monitored
There’s a peculiar duality afforded by a gemlog — especially one I don’t host.
I have no idea if anyone reads this. It is linked from one of our blogs, but you have to look to even find that blog, let alone notice the link. Then you have to work out how to follow a gemini:// url. I assume most don’t. Accordingly, I may well be just using this as a barely-public private journal. It is technically open, and maybe multiple people subscribe and read what I write. Maybe someone will stumble upon it someday and read the whole backlog. Maybe it’s never been seen by anyone and never will. There are no logs for me to access, no Referers or User-Agents to analyse for signs of life. Even Lia’s blog gets a few unique non-bot readers a day on average. This one? It is unknowable.
On the one hand, I repeatedly get the niggling sensation that writing here is a kind of pointlessness. I could just write in Notes.app, and sometimes do (though so far I’ve always used it as a staging for drafts that end up here — don’t want a downed Safari tab to destroy my work, especially on mobile). The local niceties are that you can call a piece done, which a note in Notes.app never really is, and that I can mirror them into a git repository programmatically for my own archival purposes. Notes.app is not very instrumentable.
On the other hand, because of this, I am able to write more openly. If I knew I had any kind of readership at all, I might not write some things, or might write differently. It is completely plausible that this will never be seen, and so I can say whatever I want to myselves. It is freeing despite-of-slash-because-of the potential pointlessness. I get the impression I am baring my true self to the world, perhaps, because I am possibly not doing that at all.