Geddit, link aggregator for Gemini

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 11:42:20AM +0200, Peter Vernigorov wrote:
> Been working on a super simple link aggregator like reddit that works for
> Gemini.
> 
> gemini://geddit.pitr.ca
> 
> Decided against likes/votes as these would be inflated by crawlers.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

It will be interesting to see how the possibility of applications like
this holds up long term in Geminispace.  Obviously on the web things
like Reddit rely very strongly on what are essentially tracking
technologies to combat spam by imposing rate limits for posting, making
people do CAPTCHAS, and so on.  Gemini has deliberately much reduced
ability for this kind of thing.  It won't matter in the early days when
this stuff is all for fun and has very little visibility (there are
plenty of guestbooks and things on Gophespace which are totally open in
this way but are totally spam free because it's just too out of the
way), but if Gemini ever really seriously takes off it will become an
issue.

Making people provide a client certificate and create an account is one
possible solution, and for something like a Reddit-clone people might
see that see the hassle of having to do that as worthwhile.  For quick
and simple things, like "likes", nobody will want to bother, so they
will eventually become totally meaningless (which somemight argue they
are in the first place :p).

This isn't necessarily a problem.  We don't need to recreate every part
of the web experience in Gemini - in fact, I and probably many others
will actively resist this!  But it will be very interesting to watch the
interaction of technical limitations and cultural norms and see which
kinds of familiar "tropes" from the web we carry over, which ones we
modify in some way to fit the new environment and which ones we simply
reject outright, or replace with something better.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

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