Again on feeds in Gemini format

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 04:44:06PM +0100, Solderpunk wrote:
>I quite agree with this perspective.  The biggest drawback to using Atom
>as the standard way to subscribe to serial content on Gemini is not the
>difficulty of parsing, but that it requires the authors of such content
>to generate the feed file.  I thought this could be addressed with good
>tooling, such as my gemfeed program, but real world experience in
>helping people use it, and using it myself, has proven this is not
>actually straightforward.

It is true that authors generally have to run a program to generate an 
RSS/ATOM feed, but how is this different from self-hosting Spacewalk? 
Either way, if you want to own your feed, you'll have to run a command. 
The difference seems to be that the former (plain RSS/ATOM) takes the 
static-site-gen route while the latter (Spacewalk & co.) takes the route 
of dynamically-generated content. The merits and use-cases for static 
and dynamic sites is a slightly different discussion that's been going 
on for decades.

>If somebody wants to use such a tool, more power to them, but ideally 
>one should be able to manage a capsule entirely by hand with nothing 
>more than a standard text editor if that's what one wants to do, and 
>still participate in Geminispace as a first class citizen.  Atom feeds 
>don't fit well with this ideal.

I agree, but I don't think this means that we should move away from Atom 
feeds. I think that exposing an Atom feed (or newsletter) to let users 
get new posts sent to them and saved offline is a bit different than 
having a Gemini service run by someone else aggregate links. The two can 
co-exist without competing.

That being said, I find the new proposals interesting. I'm more than 
willing to revise my statements if they prove to be better. But having a 
single program (my RSS/Atom reader) from which to get updates from all 
the *logs I follow is something I hope doesn't go away. It's the main 
reason why I use Sloum's bombadillo as my main client, since it mostly 
eliminates the need to juggle multiple clients for multiple protocols.

TLDR: the new alternatives to RSS/Atom are nice, and I hope they succeed 
without making me use more than one client for browsing and one client 
for fetching updates across the text-based Internet.
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