💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 002549.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:07:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Brian Evans b__m__e at mailfence.com
Wed Sep 2 23:28:46 BST 2020
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I can appreciate the instinct to archive, but I fall into the camp that would generally prefer that it not be done (while respecting that withthe way the technology is built, there is not a reasonable way toprevent it).
I think a great tragedy of the internet is the inability to be forgottenand to retract and change and not have your past mistakes dictateyour present. I dont have a technical solution for that in gemini, orfor that matter in gopher... but think that community norms andexpectations should develop around it organically (which is oftaking place currently in this discussion and will continue to doso over time). I definitely support the commons for articles,information, and "knowledge"... but hesitate to extend that to whatare sometimes the only personal outlets that some people may have.
I think if something like `robots.txt` were to be used for thispurpose I would recommend doing it at the directory level (and thusbreak from how robots.txt works). In gemini many (most?) users are apart of multiuser systems. If `robots.txt` at the root were used it would generally control the whole domain and not allow forindividual users to opt in or out. To that, I would also put in a vote foran opt-in system rather than an opt-out system (like robots.txt). Opt-inempowers all users to make choices whereas opt-out is often limitedto those that know to do so and have the technical know how to doso.
There are also environmental and energy arguments against fullprotocol archiving, though those costs may be small while gemini isat or around its current size.
Anyway, just a few thoughts.