An exercise in being (not actually) censored
Disclaimer: No one censored me. And even if my initial asumptions were true, censorship would be too hard of a verdict. The title really is just clickbait and it obviously worked because you're reading this transmission.
About a week ago, maybe two, I wrote a transmission about something, I forgot which one exactly it was, and as usual I submitted the feed url to ew0k's antenna instance. And my transmission never showed up there. So I scrolled down and noticed that all transmissions from the last few days were missing. And all of that after I had published a transmission that was 100% political and unapologetic. Nothing that would be controversial among anarchists but given that so many people in geminispace seem to be lib tech people (there isn't a Politics space on Bubble but one on Anarchocapitalism[derogarory], need I say more?) someone writing a hysterical email to ew0k and getting banned isn't an outlandish thought to have in that moment. So I wrote ew0k an email, just asking "hey, did I offend anyone" while thanking them for running antenna but they never answered. Which is fine, people can just be busy and some email from some random gemini weirdo quickly falls through the cracks.
This text isn't a critic of ew0k or Antenna or gemini or anything. It's a bit of a reflexion on my own reaction, the concequences I took from it and where that had led me.
So in my mind, I assumed I was banned from Antenna. So far so good. What now?
I looked around geminispace for another aggregator that lets me throw my transmissions at. Because I just came here recently, I have no idea if anyone subscribes to any of my gemlogs and while I'm not keen on having "all the attention and fame" (I wouldn't write on gemini of all places if I would), only writing out into the black void without anyone knowing my capsule or gemfeeds exist feels a little bit pointless.
Well, I didn't find another antenna instance. There's CAPCOM and Cosmos and a few small ones but none that just lets you submit a url and it'll be relayed and amplified without further questions. So I thought.
So I got thinking about aggregators as pieces of social infrastructure, essentially making them platforms. Not platforms that host content but distribution hubs, facilitating transmissions between strangers. And I'm a small community person so I thought we really should have more aggregators, catering to specific groups of people. And maybe ways for the aggregators to federate. I am drawing a lot from the architecture of the fediverse here, just for gemfeeds coming from capsules that can all reside on their own servers and the "instances" simply facilitate the feed aggrigation, like the local timeline on mastodon.
Actual interaction between people doesn't need infrastructure we don't already have, as I have written about here[1] but in a vast dark space filled with strangers, dedicated meeting spots are what communities form around.
So naturally, I setup my own small aggregator and couldn't find the antenna sourcecode and other pieces of software failed to build and it's a messy story but in the end I had setup a comitium instance[2] while simultainiously writing about power structures and centralization jada jada. And I eventually came across a transmission by ucant, leading me to learn that ew0k will retire their antenna instance and there's new ones popping up and they wanna federate. And I also stumbled across DSN[3] and long story short, the social infrastructure of feed aggregators is changing and that's good. And all of that happened without me having anything to do with it.
So I thought hey, cool, people are doing cool things, and went about my way. Until I came across the reason why my transmissions didn't show up on antenna and I am still laughing about myself here.
See, gmi is such a simple markup language and gemfeed is such a simple format, I never looked into using some site generator for my capsule. I just write gmi files and if it's a transmission to go in a feed I just add a link with a datestamp in the appropriate file. And I have a slight number dyslexia. And about 10 days ago, I consistently dated my new feed entries to 2024 instead of 2026. I guess subconciously I keep looking at the date in the line below so after it happened once, I continued to type 2024. And that's why my submissions to Antenna stopped showing up of cause.
Now during all this, I was never angry or frustrated. I already had thoughts about ew0k's antenna instance being so central and that being an itch to me. And I already had thoughts about federation, etc. And in the end none of this matters.
Shoutout to ew0k for running antenna for so long and to all the people that are working on its successors and change is good when it forces adaptation to social needs.