Starting a tinylog

After Twitter died but before Bluesky won the race to replace it^[1], Mastodon was picking up a lot of attention from outside the usual FOSS crowd. I had never tried microblogging before--or any social media for that matter--so I figured I would give it a go.

I tried Mastodon three times, and fell off each time^[2]. Looking back, I think microblogging just isn't for me. It felt like everyone who bubbled up in my feed was funnier and more clever than me, and I couldn't help but compare myself to them. I was hanging on my phone feeding off the pings every time I got a rare like or retweet. It wasn't good for me.

I eventually settled on a read-only Bluesky so I can keep up with IRL friends.

Recently, my friend Ån got me back into Gemini--a sort of lightweight alternative to the web. They sold me on making a tinylog--the Gemini equivalent of a microblog.

You can find mine here: gemini://gemini.lark.gay/log/

I'm optimistic about this go-around. I think shouting into the void might work better for me than fishing for engagement; few enough people use Gemini that I don't feel so much pressure to produce quality content. My hope is that this can just be a place where I dump my miscellaneous thoughts over the course of the day without thinking too hard about it. Maybe I have a handful of friends who check in periodically. Maybe it's just for me.

I even set up a flow so I can post tinylog entries from my phone! That turned out to be much more complicated than I anticipated, so the rest of this post is going to be my devlog.

The devlog

The tinylog itself is a single gemtext file that is appended to with new log entries. That file then needs to be checked into version control, pushed to GitHub, and copied to my Gemini server.

To post a tinylog entry, I use this web form. I have a magic link with a token in the query params that authenticates me.

That web form makes a fetch request against this edge function, which pulls the gemtext file from GitHub, appends the new entry, and pushes it back to main. I made this unnecessarily complicated by calling GitHub's low-level API to modify the git database directly. I could have just shelled out to git and executed a few commands, but instead I have to juggle refs, trees, blobs, and commits by hand. It is unclear why I chose this path.

Once the updated gemtext file is in main, I use a CI pipeline to copy the file to my VPS over SFTP. The CI pipeline in turn calls a just recipe.

It's clunky and inefficient. Posting a single tinylog entry takes over 30 seconds start to finish.

Still, I'm excited to give it a try.