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Message boards via e-mail, not Gemini

nothien at uber.space nothien at uber.space

Fri Jan 8 14:02:41 GMT 2021

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I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, andthinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been aroundfor quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time andthought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0kand their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doingthis. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been usingthem neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form andshort-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of thefollowing 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 notdesigned to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serveinformation in a single direction. We must only use protocols forthings they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing theiroriginal purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rootedconventions.

Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. Whatare 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 ongithub.