💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202109 › 20210922-on-availability.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A message^ on the OrbitalFox Gemini mailing list caught my attention yesterday. It mentioned that when a capsule link yields an error message, the author is tempted to assume that the capsule is dead and its owner has abandoned the protocol. I hadn't thought about this assumption much, but once I read it, I realized that I do the same thing. If a Gemini link worked last week, but I try it today and it doesn't work, I assume the capsule has been taken offline permanently.
I don't make this assumption in regards to only Geminispace. I keep a Zim-formatted bookmarks file on my devices, and occasionally I'll go through it to check if the more obscure links are still working. If an small independent website is down, but it was up last month, I naturally suspect it's gone permanently.
This phenomenon is a fascinating one to me. It's almost a form of object impermanence: if a site is gone at all, it must be gone forever. I wonder if there are known psychological underpinnings to it, or if research has been conducted on it before.
More immediately, this can cause a problem for people trying to reach my own capsule. Every now and then, gmnisrv will crash, and I currently do not have a service configured to automatically restart the server on failure. The capsule could be down for hours before I notice and restart it. In the meantime, anyone who tries to reach me is unable to do so, and he or she might think the capsule is permanently offline.
In the absence of caches and offline mirrors of my content, I need to be more proactive in ensuring my capsule is always reachable. Otherwise I risk people never coming back as soon as they see their first connection failure.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]