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Antenna

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Mon Sep 13 02:24:37 PM +0430 2021

gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

Staying true to the slownet philosophy, I finally after weeks (months?) got around to figuring out how to use Antenna, something that has been on my to-do list for a long time since I first heard about the aggregator.

As you probably already know, what it does is scan gemlogs for content, providing you with an updated list of new posts/content. The novel aspect of it is that, unlike other aggregators, it only scans for content specifically when requested.

Personally, I think this is a brilliant idea as it is so much more efficient than regularly hitting a large number of pages (often multiple times a day) hoping that one of them has new content. It probably very often happens that none of them do. Where Antenna shines is that since new content is actively and voluntarily submitted, it's more of a "push" system.

The beauty of the whole thing is that the maintainer no longer has to worry about curating content themselves, like maintaining a list of pages to track. Rather than finding the content, the content finds you! This so much more effective of a way to use resources. Dead/inactive content is automatically excluded from the system, too.

For example, I have been using comitium (which I love) on my server for a while now to update some custom feeds, one being a feed dedicated to Esperanto content on Gemini. It scans four pages every twenty-four hours (not too bad), but no new content has been found for so long that the feed is actually empty now. It's almost pointless to keep it running.

There may be downsides to Antenna. I'm sure the system could be abused, like excessive requests or unwanted content, but the former at least seems not terribly likely to happen. Another potential issue is that content creators (like me) have to first learn about Antenna and figure out how to us it and incorporate it into our work flows.

Thankfully, figuring how to utilize it was not difficult at all. Since I already use diohsc as my Gemini browser, I can just call diohsc to submit a query ever time I post new content. There are probably much leaner and lighter utilities that can do this just as easily from the command line or in a shell script. (diohsc isn't really lightweight, but convenint because I have it handy.) Even if you are a non-technical user, you can just bookmark the submission link in any browser that you use and open it manually as needed. (Of course, if you're not technical, I'm not sure how you managed to create content on Gemini in the first place!)

In any case, congratulations on this excellent project. It's a great addition to Gemspace, and just one more reason why this is such a cool and unique platform.