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Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:02:41 +0100
I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, and
thinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been around
for quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time and
thought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0k
and their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,
and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doing
this. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using
them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and
short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the
following advantages:
everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail
threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like
the archives for this mailing list, at
https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.
Gemini has. I know we all here love Gemini, but e-mail is going to
work better for a lot of people. There are already tons of e-mail
server setups and mail clients which people use - there's no need to
develop more.
everyone already checks their mail. There's no need to make new
applications to poll gemini pages to see if there are replies or
anything.
here, but MIME was created for e-mail in the first place. If you're
in love with Gemtext, just send text/gemini e-mails - we can read
them, they're plain text.
Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /
libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is not
designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serve
information in a single direction. We must only use protocols for
things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing their
original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rooted
conventions.
Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. What
are yours?
~aravk | ~nothien
P.S: If you don't like e-mail because it's too difficult to work with,
but you like UNIX / shell scripts, check out leahneukirchen's mblaze on
github.
--------
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 14:17:24 +0000
Hi All.
On this topic, yet digressing a bit from Gemini, I started working on a
bulletin board (and more*) system that supports full interaction via email --
and only via email. The system is called friSBEe, where the SBE stands for
service by email. I created it at the beginning of this year but haven't
touched it much since. It's pretty raw, but also very flexible and could
easily be extended to support Gemini connections.
If you're interested in this, check out: https://rawtext.club/~frisbee/ And
feel free to contact me if you would like to test it out.
messaging between users (yes, text messages on top of text email), and a few
others.
cmccabe
On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 03:02:41PM +0100, nothien at uber.space wrote:
I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, and
thinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been around
for quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time and
thought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0k
and their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,
and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doing
this. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using
them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and
short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the
following advantages:
* decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,
everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail
threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like
the archives for this mailing list, at
https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.
* well-established system: e-mail has been around for way longer than
Gemini has. I know we all here love Gemini, but e-mail is going to
work better for a lot of people. There are already tons of e-mail
server setups and mail clients which people use - there's no need to
develop more.
* notifications: people subscribed to a mailing list get mails, and
everyone already checks their mail. There's no need to make new
applications to poll gemini pages to see if there are replies or
anything.
* just as much variety in mail content: by default, we use text/plain
here, but MIME was created for e-mail in the first place. If you're
in love with Gemtext, just send text/gemini e-mails - we can read
them, they're plain text.
Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /
libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is not
designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serve
information in a single direction. We must only use protocols for
things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing their
original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rooted
conventions.
Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. What
are yours?
~aravk | ~nothien
P.S: If you don't like e-mail because it's too difficult to work with,
but you like UNIX / shell scripts, check out leahneukirchen's mblaze on
github.
--------
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 14:41:46 +0000
Oops, I meant to say I started on it at the beginning of *last* year.
cmccabe
On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 02:17:24PM +0000, cmccabe at rawtext.club wrote:
Hi All.
On this topic, yet digressing a bit from Gemini, I started working on a
bulletin board (and more*) system that supports full interaction via email --
and only via email. The system is called friSBEe, where the SBE stands for
service by email. I created it at the beginning of this year but haven't
touched it much since. It's pretty raw, but also very flexible and could
easily be extended to support Gemini connections.
If you're interested in this, check out: https://rawtext.club/~frisbee/ And
feel free to contact me if you would like to test it out.
* features include a BBS, a blog system, a choose-your-own text adventure,
messaging between users (yes, text messages on top of text email), and a few
others.
cmccabe
On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 03:02:41PM +0100, nothien at uber.space wrote:
> I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, and
> thinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been around
> for quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time and
> thought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0k
> and their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,
> and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doing
> this. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using
> them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and
> short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the
> following advantages:
>
> * decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,
> everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail
> threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like
> the archives for this mailing list, at
> https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.
>
> * well-established system: e-mail has been around for way longer than
> Gemini has. I know we all here love Gemini, but e-mail is going to
> work better for a lot of people. There are already tons of e-mail
> server setups and mail clients which people use - there's no need to
> develop more.
>
> * notifications: people subscribed to a mailing list get mails, and
> everyone already checks their mail. There's no need to make new
> applications to poll gemini pages to see if there are replies or
> anything.
>
> * just as much variety in mail content: by default, we use text/plain
> here, but MIME was created for e-mail in the first place. If you're
> in love with Gemtext, just send text/gemini e-mails - we can read
> them, they're plain text.
>
> Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /
> libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is not
> designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serve
> information in a single direction. We must only use protocols for
> things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing their
> original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rooted
> conventions.
>
> Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. What
> are yours?
>
> ~aravk | ~nothien
>
> P.S: If you don't like e-mail because it's too difficult to work with,
> but you like UNIX / shell scripts, check out leahneukirchen's mblaze on
> github.
--------
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:01:37 +0000
I've been making something like this to view mailing list archives that
are hosted on sourcehut.
It uses the sourcehut API to retrieve lists and threads and then uses
some simple formatting to display them as gemini pages.
I've opted to display all the email bodies as preformatted (like they
appear on sourcehut too) partly because of the way the lines are wrapped.
It's only experimental / proof of concept and I've only enabled it for
my own public-inbox list for now but yeah, it's here:
gemini://lists.grizzlybear.site/
Or direct link to the public mailing list:
gemini://lists.grizzlybear.site/~supergrizzlybear/public-inbox
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--------
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 16:43:17 +0100
Nicol? Balzarotti <anothersms at gmail.com> wrote:
Right now, it's quite the opposite. Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co.
control the vast majority of email addresses. Also, they don't like
emails sent from dynamic ips. Try to setup a mail server nowadays. I
have, but my internet provider gives me a dynamic ip. Fine? Nope, my
mail is blocked by 90% of providers, even if my setup is correct and
my score on [1] is excellent, google refuses to accept my emails. So
here I am, sending a mail from a google account. Email was
decentralized, now it is not. But if you can prove me wrong (host a
mail server with a dynamic ip and being able to send emails to
anybody) please do, I'd really like to ditch google mail.
[1] https://www.mail-tester.com/
You're right, the situation right now is not ideal. But there are some
alternative solutions. For example, I'm using Uberspace, which is a
pretty cheap hosting platform. E-mails from my Uberspace address are
generally accepted by Google and the like. ProtonMail is also pretty
good (but you'll want emersion's hydroxide for IMAP/SMTP on free plans).
You could probably crawl through all the addresses on this mailing list
and find some suitable domains - I just did so for the last 2011 e-mails
on this list, with the following domains and counts of e-mail addresses:
$ mlist us/list/gemini | mseq -S
$ mhdr -h To:Cc -A : |
sed -e 's/^.* <\(.*\)>$/\1/' -e 's/^\(.*\)@\(.*\)$/\2 \1/' |
sort -u |
awk 'BEG{p="";c=0}{if(p==$1){c++}else{if (length(p))print c,p;p=$1;c=1}}END{print c,p}' |
sort -nr
18 gmail.com
5 protonmail.com
3 tilde.team
3 posteo.net
3 disroot.org
2 riseup.net
2 lists.orbitalfox.eu
1 ybad.name
1 yandex.ru
1 worrbase.com
1 welz.org.za
1 ur.gs
1 uber.space
1 typed-hole.org
1 twistfold.it
1 talon.computer
1 systemli.org
1 susa.net
1 stillspinning.cc
1 stellarbound.space
1 sources.org
1 shit.cx
1 shadowfacts.net
1 SDF.ORG
1 sdf.org
1 scotdoyle.com
1 rwv.io
1 royniang.com
1 rkumar-dekstop
1 randomroad.net
1 qwertqwefsday.eu
1 posteo.de
1 perso.pw
1 paulgorman.org
1 openwork.nz
1 omarpolo.com
1 nytpu.com
1 nuegia.net
1 no.ucant.org
1 nothien.uber.space
1 nerdtracker.com
1 nassur.net
1 namu.blue
1 monocles.de
1 meff.me
1 maxxk.me
1 marmaladefoo.com
1 lavabit.com
1 kaction.cc
1 idiomdrottning.org
1 gugod.fr
1 gph.dk
1 g-n.site
1 gkbrk.com
1 fastmail.se
1 emmah.net
1 emilis.net
1 ecmelberk.com
1 drsudo.com
1 depar.is
1 dengine.net
1 ctrl-c.club
1 crowesnest.io
1 coopdot.com
1 conman.org
1 cmpwn.com
1 chilliet.eu
1 ccil.org
1 carcosa.net
1 caolan.uk
1 benthor.name
1 benburwell.com
1 benaaron.dev
1 asciiking.com
1 apetre.sc
1 anemon.es
1 alexwennerberg.com
1 adnano.co
1 activ.ism.rocks
1 acdw.net
1 202x.moe
But even if e-mail is not the right protocol to use, Gemini is
definitely worse. If you have suggestions beyond either one, please do
share.
~aravk | ~nothien
--------
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:08:50 +0100
nothien at uber.space wrote:
```
$ mlist us/list/gemini | mseq -S
$ mhdr -h To:Cc -A : |
sed -e 's/^.* <\(.*\)>$/\1/' -e 's/^\(.*\)@\(.*\)$/\2 \1/' |
sort -u |
awk 'BEG{p="";c=0}{if(p==$1){c++}else{if (length(p))print c,p;p=$1;c=1}}END{print c,p}' |
sort -nr
...
```
Whoops, missed "From" (thus missing mails never replied to). Adding it
in, we get:
28 gmail.com 8 protonmail.com 5 tilde.team 5 lists.orbitalfox.eu 5 disroot.org 3 riseup.net 3 posteo.net 3 posteo.de 2 typed-hole.org 2 sdf.org 2 rawtext.club 2 mailbox.org 2 kaction.cc 2 g-n.site 2 envs.net 1 ybad.name 1 yandex.ru 1 xylon.me.uk 1 wydooghe.com 1 worrbase.com 1 welz.org.za 1 vyhnal.net 1 vnsf.xyz 1 vittal.dev 1 uri.edu 1 ur.gs 1 uber.space 1 twistfold.it 1 tryingtobeawesome.com 1 tilde.pink 1 tilde.institute 1 thesudorm.com 1 talon.computer 1 systemli.org 1 swinslow.net 1 svmhdvn.name 1 susa.net 1 strotmann.de 1 stillspinning.cc 1 stellarbound.space 1 sources.org 1 slub.co 1 shtanton.com 1 shit.cx 1 shadowfacts.net 1 seirdy.one 1 SDF.ORG 1 sdf.org 1 sdfeu.org 1 scotdoyle.com 1 rwv.io 1 rw-net.de 1 runbox.com 1 royniang.com 1 rocketnine.space 1 rkumar-dekstop 1 rawhex.com 1 randomroad.net 1 qwertqwefsday.eu 1 provisoire.ca 1 posixcafe.org 1 pm.me 1 perso.pw 1 paulgorman.org 1 paritybit.ca 1 palm93.com 1 owlsne.st 1 outlook.com 1 orlando-lutes.com 1 orbitalfox.eu 1 openwork.nz 1 ondollo.com 1 omarpolo.com 1 nytpu.com 1 nuegia.net 1 no.ucant.org 1 nothien.uber.space 1 ngalt.com 1 nerdtracker.com 1 natpen.net 1 nassur.net 1 namu.blue 1 monocles.de 1 mmn.on.ca 1 mmn.name 1 meff.me 1 mckillop.org 1 maxxk.me 1 masterq32.de 1 marmaladefoo.com 1 macaw.me 1 low-key.me 1 lolcow.email 1 librem.one 1 lavabit.com 1 jb55.com 1 jannisr.de 1 iwritethe.codes 1 itwont.work 1 iki.fi 1 iff.ink 1 idiomdrottning.org 1 hushmail.com 1 gugod.fr 1 gsthnz.com 1 gph.dk 1 going-flying.com 1 gkbrk.com 1 foxypossibilities.com 1 fastmail.se 1 fastmail.com 1 eulenzombie.de 1 enzo.thebackupbox.net 1 emmah.net 1 eml.cc 1 emilis.net 1 eletrotupi.com 1 ecmelberk.com 1 drsudo.com 1 dmerej.info 1 deszaras.xyz 1 depar.is 1 dengine.net 1 dejanstrbac.com 1 ctrl-c.club 1 crowesnest.io 1 coopdot.com 1 conman.org 1 cmpwn.com 1 chilliet.eu 1 celehner.com 1 ccil.org 1 cbrews.xyz 1 carcosa.net 1 caolan.uk 1 calcuode.com 1 benthor.name 1 bendb.com 1 benburwell.com 1 benaaron.dev 1 asciiking.com 1 apintandaparma.club 1 apetre.sc 1 anemon.es 1 andygrn.co.uk 1 alexwennerberg.com 1 adnano.co 1 activ.ism.rocks 1 acdw.net 1 abrah.ms 1 202x.moe
--------
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:14:02 +0100
nothien at uber.space writes:
We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using
them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and
short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the
following advantages:
There's a major drawback in emails that render them useless IMHO:
* decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,
everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail
threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like
the archives for this mailing list, at
https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.
Right now, it's quite the opposite. Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co.
control the vast majority of email addresses. Also, they don't like
emails sent from dynamic ips. Try to setup a mail server nowadays. I
have, but my internet provider gives me a dynamic ip. Fine? Nope, my
mail is blocked by 90% of providers, even if my setup is correct and my
score on [1] is excellent, google refuses to accept my emails. So here
I am, sending a mail from a google account. Email was decentralized,
now it is not. But if you can prove me wrong (host a mail server with a
dynamic ip and being able to send emails to anybody) please do, I'd
really like to ditch google mail.
[1] https://www.mail-tester.com/
--------
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 18:55:13 +0100
On Jan 8, 2021, at 15:14, Nicol? Balzarotti <anothersms at gmail.com> wrote:
Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co. control the vast majority of email addresses.
Yahoo? Is it a thing? In 2020?
You are conflating various underlying causes.
Also, they don't like emails sent from dynamic ips.
Must email traffic is spam. And most of the work is to filter out spam.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/420391/spam-email-traffic-share/
Therefore the challenge of using a random residential address to do anything. No one will trust you. Rightly so, as most of them are compromised.
The challanges of setting up your own email infrastructure lies there: trust.
https://www.spamhaus.org/organization/
On the other hand, one could totally setup an alt-mail service, old-school, perhaps peer-to-peer, among friends and family.
Just don't expect the rest of the world to interact with it.
? ???
--------
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 14:19:23 -0500
nothien at uber.space writes:
Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /
libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is
not designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to
serve information in a single direction. We must only use protocols
for things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing
their original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but
deep-rooted conventions.
I agree with the principle here, but there's another aspect to the
back-and-forth.
Mailing lists and NNTP are, of course, the correct protocols for fora or
message boards. But I think what people want here is different. Gemlog
posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world to read.
It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs in response
to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging community
before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded out by social
media.
What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct analogue
of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of gemlog
posts responding to each other, but also get notification when your own
posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps may look
too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach to the
question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to do a
POST-equivalent over Gemini.
--
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
--------
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 20:36:17 +0100 (CET)
8 janv. 2021 ? 15:14 de anothersms at gmail.com:
Right now, it's quite the opposite. Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co.
control the vast majority of email addresses. Also, they don't like
emails sent from dynamic ips. Try to setup a mail server nowadays. I
have, but my internet provider gives me a dynamic ip. Fine? Nope, my
mail is blocked by 90% of providers, even if my setup is correct and my
score on [1] is excellent, google refuses to accept my emails. So here
I am, sending a mail from a google account. Email was decentralized,
now it is not. But if you can prove me wrong (host a mail server with a
dynamic ip and being able to send emails to anybody) please do, I'd
really like to ditch google mail.
I used to run my own mail server* (the domain picked up in the following messages with listed domains - is mmn.name).? My ISP issues static IPs but honestly, that doesn't change the arbitrary blocking from the big providers.
However, you can use a smarthost while still hosting your own server(s).? Personally I use spamhero.com to manage in and outbound emails, and block off my mail server ports only to their IPs, it's a bit more expensive at 15$ a month.
If you just want SMTP relay, then duocircle (https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp) is free for 1 000 messages a month or 4$ for 2 500.? I've probably max sent 1 500 emails in a month at a peak, it's surprisingly hard.
There is, of course, your ISP's SMTP server, but that's a gamble, my ISP is geared towards advanced users hosting their own services so there isn't any weird restrictions on sender domains. Whereas other ISPs are more anti-that and will probably make every effort to ruin your life by blocking domains that are not their crap email domain.
It's kind of cheating the self hosted ethos, but it at least means you guarantee delivery.
= the server crashed for good and I was too lazy to fix it.? I still kind of do as my BBS is up and running and does still have to send and receive internet email.
-K?vin
--------
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 22:14:05 +0100
Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:
Mailing lists and NNTP are, of course, the correct protocols for fora
or message boards. But I think what people want here is different.
Gemlog posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world
to read. It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs
in response to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging
community before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded
out by social media.
What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct
analogue of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of
gemlog posts responding to each other, but also get notification when
your own posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps
may look too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach
to the question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to
do a POST-equivalent over Gemini.
I understand what you mean, but to be honest, I don't have a solution to
that. I can't think of a way of bringing that feeling that you've
described to a system that properly manages replies, because I think a
fundamental part of that feeling is that the posts-in-reply are actually
disconnected, and on another person's site. A system that notifies you
(e.g. via e-mail) that you've got replies seems to destroy that feeling,
partly I think because it's too similar to the social media that have
taken over the world. Maybe it's different for you.
On the other hand, I have another idea for the mailing list / forum
system I talked about: introduce self-hosted mail servers where only you
can introduce new (i.e. not in reply to anything) mails. Publishing a
new post is equivalent to sending it to the server, from where anyone
subscribed will get it. And on top of that mail server would be a
Gemini interface. One could introduce someone else's post (and the
entire associated reply set) into their own mailing list to "boost" it
like in Mastodon, or to just include their replies to it in their own
list. It sounds like fun to write - I'll get to it (the Gemini side;
there are already enough mail servers) when I can, but (anyone) feel
free to have a go.
~aravk | ~nothien
--------
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 21:57:22 -0000 (UTC)
On Fri, 08 Jan 2021 22:14:05 +0100, nothien wrote:
Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:
> Mailing lists and NNTP are, of course, the correct protocols for fora
> or message boards. But I think what people want here is different.
> Gemlog posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world
> to read. It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs
> in response to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging
> community before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded
> out by social media.
>
> What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct
> analogue of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of
> gemlog posts responding to each other, but also get notification when
> your own posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps
> may look too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach to
> the question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to do a
> POST-equivalent over Gemini.
I understand what you mean, but to be honest, I don't have a solution to
that. I can't think of a way of bringing that feeling that you've
described to a system that properly manages replies, because I think a
fundamental part of that feeling is that the posts-in-reply are actually
disconnected, and on another person's site. A system that notifies you
(e.g. via e-mail) that you've got replies seems to destroy that feeling,
partly I think because it's too similar to the social media that have
taken over the world. Maybe it's different for you.
In https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/003299.html an idea
was that servers track client referers to present those referers to the
next visitors, but we do not have referers for very good reasons.
Sketching out the idea nevertheless ...
content, eg containing "## Re: " or "=> [own URL]"
Alternatively webrings were proposed, which does seem like the correct
Gemini way of doing it, though.
--------
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2021 11:15:13 +0900
I think XMPP's PubSub spec would be a great way to do this. Movim.eu
built an entire social networking platform on top of this. Not
everyone uses XMPP though, unlike email.
I think a public inbox to collect responses is the neatest way to
do this through email, at least the simplest. . You could just run
a script to parse the posts to the lists, optionally convert them
ti gemtext, and generate an index of all the responses.
I think someone recently posted something like this to the list
(or maybe it was another, or a dream! I'm to sleep deprived to tell!)
~mieum gemini://rawtext.club/~mieum/
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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:00:11 GMT
On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 02:19:23PM -0500, Jason McBrayer wrote:
Gemlog posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world
to read. It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs
in response to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging
community before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded
out by social media.
What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct
analogue of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of
gemlog posts responding to each other, but also get notification when
your own posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps
may look too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach to
the question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to do a
POST-equivalent over Gemini.
This has been solved on the WWW through Webmentions. It should be
possible to bring this to a Gemini site, though perhaps not using the
Gemini protocol.
Currently, if Alice writes a (micro)blog post responding to Bob's post,
Bob can get a notification or display Alice's response as a comment
under his post automatically. The result is something that can replace
silos like social media; everyone owns their own sites and talks to each
other, posting and repeating like Twitter or the various Fediverse
microblogging implementations.
To bring this to Gemini, Webmention software could simply handle
Webmentions with gemini:// URLs. The sending of Webmentions could be
done over HTTP, but the verification of Webmentions sent using gemini://
will obviously use the Gemini protocol.
I'll be working on something like ddevault's openring
(https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring/), but for saved Webmentions instead
of RSS feeds; I'll probably include an option for Gemtext output as well
as HTML.
--
/Seirdy
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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:09:29 GMT
Also, to add to my last response:
Mailing lists also don't need to compete with alternatives, like my
aforementioned Webmention-based approach. If mailing list entries are
displayed alongside Webmentions or Webmentions get forwarded to the
mailing list, then we automatically get the best of both worlds.
--
/Seirdy
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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 10:52:49 +0100
Hi
Whoops, missed "From" (thus missing mails never replied to). Adding it
in, we get:
Just to a quick note of appreciation for your
effort to actually do the analysis.
My (very rough) summary gives the following
breakdown:
gmail 28
other commercial providers 17
domains with more than one sender 30
domains with one sender 134 (yay!)
I have now seen the argument:
"everybody uses gmail thesdays, sad, but you can't change that"
on a number of mailing lists and it is really
neat to see that this does not have to be the
case.
I have two observations to make:
Loads of people who have been on the internet for
some decades remember the good old days fondly,
and are sad at what the internet (well, mainly web)
has turned in to. My view is that the good parts
of the internet are still there and are better than
ever - it is just that the good parts are completely
dwarfed by the amount of rubbish that is being added
even more quickly.
So this is my theory of internet inflation (similar
to cosmic inflation):
"The bright stuff that matters is still there, but the
vacuous stuff (vacuum) in between is growing and
making the good stuff hard to find."
And I consider this list one of the bright points on
the internet, amongst the darkness of all the facebooglegram.
Then the second observation relates to the protocol discussions
here: A while ago some beginner woodworking article had
the (paraphrased) line in it:
"To get started, we recommend making your own workbench. And if
you are thinking of buying a workbench, reconsider if woodworking
is really for you"
So at the risk of being a elitist, I tend to take comments
on protocol nuances and extensions a lot more seriously
from a selfhosted email address, on the basis that the
poster has some form of experience/expertise relating to
running an internet facing service.
regards
marc
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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 22:14:10 -0500
It was thus said that the Great marc once stated:
Just to a quick note of appreciation for your
effort to actually do the analysis.
My (very rough) summary gives the following
breakdown:
gmail 28
other commercial providers 17
domains with more than one sender 30
domains with one sender 134 (yay!)
I ran my own analysys over the addresses to the mailing list (starting
from the start, August 14, 2019) and got the following:
Total unique addresses; 334
Total unique domains: 225
Domains that use Google: 20 *
Domains use a single MX host: 162 **
* Includes gmail.com and other domains that outsource email to
Google.
** Only counted domains with 1 MX record, most likely self-hosted.
I don't think this means that everybody on this list uses gmail, but it's
probably more than expected.
-spc
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Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 09:36:35 +0100
On Jan 11, 2021, at 04:14, Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:
I don't think this means that everybody on this list uses gmail, but it's
probably more than expected.
Gmail is rather convenient for public forums, a bit like a burner phone for robocalls.
? ???
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Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:14:50 -0500
On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 1:00 AM Rohan Kumar <seirdy at seirdy.one> wrote:
This has been solved on the WWW through Webmentions. It should be
possible to bring this to a Gemini site, though perhaps not using the
Gemini protocol.
This is really a very nice design. Here's my attempt to adapt it to Gemini:
1) Alice mentions Bob's post in a text/gemini document by posting her
response containing a link line to it.
2) Alice (or a tool that Alice uses) fetches Bob's post and scans it for a
link line whose text is (or contains) "Webmentions". If there isn't one,
Alice can't proceed. We'll call this the linkage URL. It can be absolute
or relative but can't contain a fragment.
3) Otherwise, Alice takes the linkage URL and appends
"source=url1&target=url2" to it in the usual way. That is, prefixed by "?"
if there is no query part already, or prefixed by & if there is. Url1 is
Alice's post and url2 is Bob's post. There is no need to %-escape either
of them. Note that this use of parameters is specific to linkage servers.
4) Alice then makes a Gemini request to the extended linkage URL. A 20
response means success, but Alice doesn't have to care what is returned
(perhaps an empty document or something human readable). The server
referenced in the linkage URL, which we will call the linkage server,
queues up the request for offline processing. This is important, as it
makes DDOSing more or less useless.
5) Alice can then do the same thing for all the other links in her post,
and then she doesn't have to worry about it any more.
6) At some future time, the linkage server referred to in Bob's post
dequeues a request:
6a) The server does some simple validation (url1 must be different from
url2, neither url must be "localhost", etc.) and makes sure that url2 is a
resource for which it is willing to accept requests. If any of this fails,
the request is dropped.
6b) The server makes sure that it hasn't seen this request before (if so,
it drops it).
6c) The server fetches Alice's post at url1 to make sure it really does
contain a link line that points to url2. If it gets an error other than
52, it can (but doesn't have to) queue up the request to try again. A 52
GONE request means don't try again, as Alice has deleted the post.
7) Exactly what happens next depends on how the linkage server works.
7a) The linkage server may notify Bob by email saying "Your post <url2> has
been linked from a post at <url1>.
7b) If the linkage server has read/write access to Bob's post (through the
file system, for example, or via sftp), it may create a link line to
Alice's post using the first "#" header line in Alice's post as the link
text, and append that line to Bob's post under a header line saying "#
Responses". This would leave a permanent record that anyone reading Bob's
post can see.
7c) Or the linkage server can do (as they say on Monty Python) something
completely different.
8) If Alice updates the post, she can repeat the process for any newly
added links.
9) More advanced client tools and linkage servers can cope with media types
other than text/gemini:
9a) If Bob's post is text/plain, it can be checked for a line saying
"Webmentions: " followed by an URL; if Alice's post is text/plain, its body
can be searched for url2.
9b) If Bob's post is text/html, it can be checked for a link or a element
whose rel attribute is "webmention"; if Alice's post is text/html, it can
be checked for a link, a, src, or video element whose href or src
attribute is url2.
9c) Linkage servers can be smarter and handle schemes other than gemini,
such as http(s), in which case they should follow <
https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/>, or gopher, or whatever.
A nice thing about this design is that Alice and Bob can do everything
pretty much by hand. Alice has to be careful to construct the right URL,
but if she messes up, nothing very bad happens. The linkage server is the
only part that has to be smart, and even then it is not all that smart.
Queueing up requests can be done by writing each one to a small file in a
directory, and they can be dequeued by reading a file from the directory
and unlinking it when it is processed. Alternatively the Posix batch(1)
command can be used to run a command that processes one request.
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org
Andrew Watt on Microsoft: Never in the field of human computing has so
much been paid by so many to so few! (pace Winston Churchill)
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