My previous post on SmolZINE somehow changed subject in the middle, so I decided to split it.
/en/2022/20220915-musings-on-smolzine.gmi
The list of gemini sites extracted from SmolZINE issues 1..33 has 203 entries. No, it is not an index yet (pointing to the particular SmolZINE issue). Nor is it an automatically generated list including the descriptions. Such a commented index list might seem desireable, however, it is going to be a lot of work to generate it and (more importantly) to keep it up to date.
There are, of course, other lists. The most exhaustive list to my knowledge is the list of Stephane Bortzmeyers Lupa crawler, currently listing a bit more than 2100 entries. I have used this list to navigate unknown-to-me territories.
gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/lupa-capsules.gmi
A similar list (currently ca. 1850 entries) is provided by the geminispace.info search engine.
gemini://geminispace.info/known-hosts
Of course, there are more such lists. There are nice hand curated lists, too. But they tend to get stuck at some point, because it is just a lot of work to keep them updated, see for example:
Then there is the wormhole experiment, which leads your browser to somewhere unforseen, if you decide to cross the wormhole:
gemini://si3t.ch/cgi-bin/wormhole
There is a daily selection of three randomly chosen sites:
Many of those sites seem to be abandoned. Many show just the flounder.online default page, or feature just a reference to a web page and similar. But there are treasures to be found. Now, you cannot speed this process up --- slow smolnet, remember? --- unless someone finds the list, that this experiment is using.
Along other lines, there is this big, hand curated list of gemini related documentation, software, services ...
https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
So a big "Thank You!" to everyone involved.
If you have something that you wish to be added to one list or other, consider contacting the list owner. Also consider writing a paragraph explaining your favourite capsule and donate this snippet to SmolZINE. Or consider adding a blog-roll to your site, where you collect this sort of information and links. While you are at it, consider hosting a copy of your favourite articles on your own capsule, before the referenced site goes offline forever. I call it "The Library".
And if you are still paying attention: consider providing your capsule as a git (or similar) repository for offline reading and archiving. Just along the lines of this post by ~solderpunk:
Low budget P2P content distribution with git
Cheers!
~ew
PS: If you visit my Library and find it useful, feel free to drop me a note via old fasioned email.