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[ANN] GemThread: an experimental conversation server

Raph M. raph at raphm.com

Fri May 28 00:36:21 BST 2021

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Hi, everyone.

I was reading carcosa.net's "Re: Comments and pingbacks" article [1],and I ended up thinking about what sort of conversation pattern makessense in Gemini-space.

Gemini is decentralized (which is different from "federated", and I'mhappy about that), and this implies to me that a conversation patternthat fits into Gemini-space should necessarily be decentralized.

Gemini is human-focused, which implies to me that building a complicatednetwork of automated pingback/webmention/trackback-like things mightalso be a poor fit. "Overkill" is the word that comes to mind.

I wanted something decentralized, lightweight, and participatory. Itshould require only a small amount of interaction from each person thatwants to use it. And it should be something that can be self-hosted, butdoesn't have to be.

After a bit of searching, I came across the GAMS specification [2]. Iliked the spec, but wondered if it might be possible to make an evensimpler conversation system.

So as an experiment, I made one.

It is called "GemThread", and the current implementation is an SCGIservice designed to run under Molly Brown. Anyone _can_ run an instanceof it, but nobody _must_ run one.

The interaction pattern should feel relatively straightforward.

To create a new thread:

write your post and publish it on your own gemini server* visit the gemthread service (see below)* find the "Add a new thread" link (under "Quick Links")* enter the gemini:// URL of your post* if you'd like to, add the link to the thread to your original post to* let people know that they can respond

To respond to a thread:

write your reponse and publish it on your gemini server* visit the gemthread servce* click the "Add a response to this thread" link at the bottom of the* thread that you want to respond to* enter the gemini:// URL of your response post.

There are more details available in the help file, which is published atthe root of the gemthread service.

Comments, criticism, and feedback are all welcome. I set up a mailinglist for it at mailto://~raphm/gemthread@lists.sr.ht .

It could be that this is a poor fit for Gemini, but I think it checksoff the boxes I had in my head. At the very least it's a stake in theground for us to find a way to build out a way to have conversationswithout losing posts or having to monitor aggregators and hope we catchall the responses. :)

The first instance of the service is here:

gemini://twistedcarrot.com/gemthread GemThread Service

The code is hosted at:

https://git.sr.ht/~raphm/gemthread

It is also mirrored at:

https://github.com/raphm/gemthread

Thank you for reading!

Raph

---References:

gemini://carcosa.net/journal/20210421-comments-and-pingbacks.gmi [1]Re: Comments and pingbacks=

gemini://gemlog.lanterne.chilliet.eu/GAMS.en.gmi [2] GAMS: GeminiAcentred Messaging System