It is cold, now. Claudia is on the balcony, looking after our plants. My brain is still filled with sounds of images of Dune. We went to see the movie, yesterday, and I haven’t been to the cinema for a very long time due to the pandemic.
I started skimming the Gemini mailing list. Everything is on fire. 🔥🔥🔥
Oh wow.
I have some opinions that I want to note down but which I don’t want to post to the list, for fear of stoking the fire.
Sean Conner is leaving. I’m sorry to see him go, but I understand his frustration. I’d be frustrated, too!
Reading on… so much misunderstanding. We are all humans. Charitable reading, charitable everything is required. I see that @tomasino wrote a “please slow down” email. That is an excellent start!
Here’s what I’d do, if I were in charge:
I’d keep the discussion on the mailing list, even though I feel it’s a huge emotional drain, and I already left the mailing list many months ago because of it. If I were in charge, I’d hope to have a bunch of friends to follow the list for me, allowing me to jump in now and then, to read the important parts, skipping the emotionally draining stuff.
Gemtext changes: I’m very happy to have convinced @solderpunk back when that a space after the title indicators was a good idea ｢#, ##, ###｣ because it would allow people to use hash tags in their posts without it being interpreted as level 1 headings. In a similar vein, I’d argue that we should require a space after the list item indicator ｢*｣ to that people can use asterisk for emphasis at the beginning of a paragraph without it being interpreted as a list item. I don’t see a similar benefit for mandating a space after the link indicator ｢⇒｣ so I wouldn’t mandate it “for consistency” since I don’t like that argument.
Bot issues: I’m convinced that there is no technical solution to idiot crawlers written by incompetent or malevolent people. These are marketeers, secret service agents, or developers with too much on their plate, or too little attention span, or both. Anybody following this blog knows that I’m on a personal Butlerian Jihad against all the bots. Therefore I’d write a “best practice” companion document that explains how server authors can use the 44 “slow down” status response to block misbehaving bots. Handling bots is a topic like TLS: hard to do right, but required.
Version control: Instead of treading a Source Hut or GitLab or whatever account as the central git repository, I’d simply use my own and tell people to send me their pull requests. And I’ll simply add their repositories as remotes and pull from there. This workflow worked surprisingly well for me when I was involved in the development of Elpher. That means, we can keep all of the clones out there, no problem.
Something like this:
git clone --origin=u9000 https://git.sr.ht/~u9000/gemini-protocol cd gemini-protocol git remote add solderpunk git://gemini.circumlunar.space/gemini-site git remote add kensanata https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-spec
Anyway.
Gemini Mailing List Archive for 2021
#Gemini
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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All the situation of Sean Conner leaving hit me harder than I was expecting, specially because suddenly I realised how many people get too heated (even not nice) in these discussions. I left the mailing list some time ago because of the same (and at least one troll, I’m very bad “ignoring” people). It didn’t feel like a community I would like to be part of. I hope it will pass.
– jjm 2021-10-23 17:55 UTC
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The mailing list is indeed very toxic. Too much bickering then people go to IRC (to justifiably) complain about the arguments that happen in the mailing list. Seems like another case of maintainer burn out. Create a cool project, then step down when the rabble becomes too much.
– 2021-10-23 20:52 UTC
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I’ve since restarted my Gemini server.
I’m also mildly amused that my license choice for the gitlab repo wasn’t bikeshedded to hell and back.
In retrospect, I think I should have just made the clarifications I saw fit without community input and say “take it or leave it.” But hey, what’s done is done. And @tomasino saying “please slow down” I find hilarious because *nothing* has happened in the past seven months.
– Sean Conner 2021-10-23 22:42 UTC
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It’ll be interesting to see if anybody will successfully pick up the pieces. The question of legitimacy will hang like the sword of Damocles over anybody trying to do the thing.
Like, I’d love to write up a section about dealing with bots for “best-practices.gmi” but I’m already feeling paralysed about adding it to the repository.
– Alex 2021-10-24 10:50 UTC
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Actually, now that wrote it down, I think that’s silly so I changed my mind and added a section on dealing with bots to the document.
– Alex 2021-10-24 11:32 UTC
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Here’s me making changes to Best Practices and FAQ, and mirroring the current version to the wiki, once per day.
What I have changed so far:
Pull requests and emails welcome!
– Alex 2021-10-24 18:18 UTC
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Well, OK. Now that I’ve gone this far, I did resubscribe to the mailing list and volunteered for something. We’ll see. 😇
– Alex 2021-10-24 20:56 UTC
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Just saw Marginalia’s point of view on the difficulties of writing a bot that’s not wrong:
Fair enough. This is hard and tricky to get right, I agree.
But then again, read through the comments here and decide for yourself:
2020-12-25 Defending against crawlers
Here are the latest numbers from the end of that page:
86% of all requests were bots over a time period of about 2¼ days.
My number 1 message to Gemini bot authors:
If you get a 44 “Slow Down” status, just do what it says and *slow down*.
– Alex 2021-10-25 12:44 UTC
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Aaaaaan… Solderpunk is going to finish the spec!
Solderpunk is going to finish the spec
I like it. 👍
– Alex 2021-10-25 19:52 UTC
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If I had to say what I disliked the most about Gemini it is the use of TLS. I love it in theory, but I wasted so many hours on it in practice.
My first problem was writing clients:
In the end, my throw-away clients always ignore run insecurely, not checking anything.
For writing servers:
Second place is how to handle internationalisation:
– Alex 2023-06-16 14:51 UTC