💾 Archived View for makeworld.space › gemlog › 2020-11-16-re_aggregator_idea.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:22:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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Thread:
ew0k is a Teddybear - Is This Aggregator Idea Good?
Drew Devault - RE: Is This Aggregator Idea Good?
ew0k wants to solve a problem:
What if you want others to find the stuff you follow? Or you want to find the stuff your friend reads?
You should probably go read ew0k's post first, but in short they suggest having some sort of automated software (running on your server) that polls a list of gemfeeds (specified by you), and then adds each post from those feeds in chronological order to a specific gemtext file. This would be run periodically so it was always up to date.
My own shannonfeed.gmi becomes an aggregate of my own posts and all the people I follow, quickly becoming a great starting page for my daily geminispace exploring while also telling others that "This is the stuff I like!".
Here is an example feed in the format ew0k proposes (raw text):
=> gemini://billsdomain.com/gemlog/posts/is-this-aggregator-idea-good.gmi 2020-11-14T22:03:12+00:00, Bill P. Jones, Is This Aggregator Idea Good? => gemini://joannnesdomain.co.uk/gemlog/posts/hello-world.gmi 2020-11-10T12:14:52+00:00, Joanne, Hello, World!
And rendered:
2020-11-14T22:03:12+00:00, Bill P. Jones, Is This Aggregator Idea Good?
2020-11-10T12:14:52+00:00, Joanne, Hello, World!
I think this format is trying both be machine and human readable, and isn't doing a good job of the latter. It's not that nice or easy to read this file, as opposed to something like CAPCOM. I suspect it would get much worse when it's a full page full of these unspaced links.
I very much agree with Drew that running your own CAPCOM instance is a good way to solve this. More people should do it. Another way would be to have a feed reader built into your gemini client, which fulfills the "great starting page for [me]" requirement, but not the "telling others" one. I've written about client feed readers before, and it's coming in Amfora, I promise!
Personal Feeds (response to Solderpunk)
If what you really want is a machine readable list of gemlogs a user follows -- maybe for creating diagrams or whatever, I would suggest a plaintext file at a predefined URL, with a list of Atom feed URLs, one per line.
For example, at gemini://example.com/.well-known/gemlogs.txt:
gemini://makeworld.gq/gemlog/atom.xml gemini://tilde.team/~ew0k/atom.xml
The user could populate this with software, by hand, whatever.
But honestly, just run your own CAPCOM instance. Or Spacewalk!