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[users] Public Gemini hosting?

Mansfield mansfield at ondollo.com

Thu Apr 8 18:52:24 BST 2021

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On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 9:20 AM Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:

Mansfield writes:

https://ondollo.com/mansfield currently offers free gemini hosting.

Thanks for asking, and thanks for writing up something to help

newcomers!

Hi! I'm deeply ambivalent about recommending your application to new

users. On the one hand, your app does *almost exactly* what I think is

the Right Thing for Gemini publishing: provide a unified native app for

both reading and publishing, with integrated account creation. I

honestly want to commend you for that.

Thanks! I think we're meeting our original objective in providing somethingthat goes from nowhere to creating content in Geminispace with as littlework or explanation as possible. That's awesome that you feel that way too.

On the other hand, neither your client nor your server are Free

Software. I can't really recommend to new users to run an untrusted

binary that I can't provide any security/privacy assurances for. Despite

my interest, I haven't even run it myself, for that reason.

Yeah, the untrusted part is something we're still working through. I doubtI would run it myself if I hadn't written it! :-D

I also think that paying to sign the binaries would still *not* be enough,right? At least, from my perspective (imagining I hadn't written it) Iwould still not trust the client or server.

Likewise, the client locks the user into using your server for

publishing. While that's certainly the easiest approach starting out,

I'd rather see an open standard for registration and publishing,

preferably using existing protocols.

Interesting perspective... I think I would have characterized itdifferently, but that's OK. When you mention 'using existing protocols', Iwould assume you mean SSH - is that what you were meaning?

Again, thanks for doing this experiment, because I think it's the right

direction for things to go; I just can't recommend it to new users at

this time.

--

Jason McBrayer | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,

jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,

| but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”

| ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Makes sense. I'll keep chipping away at something to see if progress can bemade.

I think, from your perspective, you're looking for something that is...open source... and that uses a more standard approach for registering andpublishing, right?

Maybe if the client were written to run in the browser? But then the serverwouldn't be open... humm... though... I'm curious... is there *any* serverthat is running where the code being run can be verified? I could seesomeone saying, "I'm running the open source version of FOO as the server",but they could have tweaked it to be FOO' or something... thoughts?

Again - thanks! We'll keep thinking about this.-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20210408/0224b9f2/attachment-0001.htm>