💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › 20230523-federation.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:49:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I had promised myself that I would write at least one non-technology-related article before writing a techcetera one. Which is why I haven't posted in two months. Breaking my promise, there's this.
satch: Exploring Federation and Public Communication On Gemini
In the article I'm responding to, ~satch proposes a protocol for doing federated posting (microblogging, mainly?) for the smol net, essentially by combining some automated email (or misfin) handling with basically an automated list archive served over Gemini and replicated between servers by email. If I understand it correctly, which I may well not.
And while I don't think it's fundamentally badly designed (it's a lot like simplified ActivityPub using email for sending and Gemini for reading), I'm not totally sure it's needed. To paraphrase a meme, "Want to share public messages over a bunch of servers anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called Usenet."
Slightly more serious: You can make your own Usenet hierarchy and federate those groups only within a listed set of servers. You can share messages over nncp if you want a more modern yet simple means of transport. If you like follower-based rather than topic-based social networking, you could write a client that kibozes the spool to generate a Mastodon-like feed. A read-only Gemini-based newsreader is also extremely feasible.
I do imagine wanting X:NNTP::Gemini:Gopher, and it is something I have thought about, but that's kind of a side topic.