#republish — Public Fediverse posts

@KelsonV
let me at least reply now to two things you mentioned, while I still remember.

In one of your posts you lament how you ended up not using the smartphone the way you originally anticipated; less of a content creation device, and more of an endless consumption streamer. And I recognise that and kind of agree.

If I look at my earliest smartphones, especially the #HTC #TyTNII, I used it a lot more for writing down notes, listening to music, texting, and especially chatting on #IRC. I especially liked its slide-out keyboard with tiltable screen. I could use it with one or two hands, and I could touch type without much issues. Interacting with the device felt a lot less passive and it felt more like an extension of me.

While I probably do more typing on my phone these days, with Mastodon posts taking the majority of that activity, I still don't like typing with a touchscreen keyboard. I might have some level of touch-typing on it, and I like that it can have context-specific keyboards, but I still long for feeling the keys underneath my fingers, and the keyboard not using up screen estate.

And I miss typing in landscape orientation. Sure, I could still do that, but with the aspect ratio of phones, that would not leave much screen left for the input field...

Yes, I could attach an external keyboard, but that'd be another device to lug around and keep charged. I also still haven't found a solution that would still allow me to type while holding the phone; let alone walking around with it. Granted, it's been a while since I last looked, but I dislike being repeatedly disappointed.

Though I don't like writing on my phone, I do notice that it frequently results in posts that are actually longer than I'd intended. (This post being one example.)
And while I've coded applications, and written first drafts of game guides, and blog posts on it, as well as processed data sets and written conversion tools, the idea of editing a text, or sitting down with just my phone with the intention of writing a long form post, essay or story, just doesn't appeal to me.
Perhaps it's the small screen, or the lackluster keyboard, or the risk of distractions by notifications, or merely the association of the device with consumption rather than creation?
At any rate, it's not how I originally imagined using the device either, even though I can't imagine going without one anymore.

But I guess I should take this chunk of text tomorrow, and turn it into a proper web/gem log post. ;)

What was the other thing you wrote about that I wanted to react to... ah, yes, the limitations of Gemini / gem-text.

I think I'm okay with the limitations of Gemini as a protocol, but that it's mostly gem-text as a format where I wish it was a bit more extensive.

Lack of inline links definitely is something I have to get used to, and which makes converting articles written with the web in mind more troublesome. As I don't have an intention to write the same text twice, just with different formatting, Gemini readers might not get the same first class treatment/experience, but I think that the approach of the conversion script I currently use, which copies the link texts and aggregates them as links after each line or paragraph, is a decent enough trade-off.

Images work well enough as links in Lagrange I think, and I like its approach of them being loaded inline on-demand. As an author it just forces you to think more about the text/title description of your links, qnd providing enough context, which probably is a good idea anyway, especially when considering accessibility.

I do wish though that it had an equivalent of HTML's summary/details tags, which is used to provide collapsible/expandable content. Especially since I like to use it as a form of content-warning in my (unpublished) web log.

I also agree with you that some simple styling like bold, italic, underline, and strike through would've been welcome, even though you can /sort of/ mimic it with asterisks, underscores, dashes and slashes, similar to Markdown/Asciidoc, without it actually being converted into font equivalents.

At least we have headings, though I would've liked to have seen more than 3 levels...

oh well, enough rambling I guess...

#blog #gemlog #todo #republish