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cmccabe at rawtext.club cmccabe at rawtext.club
Fri Jan 8 14:41:46 GMT 2021
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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.