tootik: Gemini+fediverse=❤️

tootik is a new social network thingy that speaks a tiny subset of ActivityPub and has a Gemini frontend.

Currently, it allows Gemini users to:

• Register with their client certificate CN (or a different username, if CN is already taken)
• Look up a fediverse user
• Follow or unfollow a user, local or federated
• See a (prioritized) list of posts by followed users ("my radio")
• See a list of public posts published by other users of this instance ("this planet"): if local user A submits a new public post, users B and C will be see it here even if they don't follow A
• See a list of public posts published by any user federated to this instance ("outer space"): if local user A follows user B from Mastodon, user B's public posts will now become part of this pool of public content
• Publish a post to followers only ("new post")
• Publish a public post ("new public post")
• List public posts by user
• "Go up" from a reply to the original post

Unauthenticated Gemini clients can see public content but can't publish anything or follow users.

HTML->gemtext conversion is not perfect, but it kinda works, and extraction of inline links seems to work well. Posts are displayed as quotes, and only the first 4 lines (in the gemtext sense) are shown in the public posts posts view. It's always <=30 posts per page, because I still haven't found a good way to optimize the ugly SQL that creates a prioritized list of posts by followed users.

All sorting of posts by publication time is based on sorting by date (then other criteria), to make the fediverse experience more ... palatable, to those who enjoy the smol web's slower pace. Posts by followed users that don't post much or don't post often are prioritized and should be harder to miss, but the algorithm is not perfect. I decided not to store any usage analytics (no viewed vs. posted posts ratio per followed users, which can be used as the first sorting key). This area will probably need improvement.

I'm mostly done refactoring and cleaning up the Go code, and I promise to open-source it soon.

Dive in!

gemini://hd.206267.xyz:8965

(It runs on an Asus Eee PC 1001PX netbook with 1 GB of RAM, but I'm currently evaluating options and might move it to a cheap VPS soon.)

(Posts are retained only for a week and I just emptied the database, so don't expect much content until the user base grows and content from the outside worled starts to flow.)