💾 Archived View for gemi.dev › gemlog › 2023-10-14-orbital-fox-redux.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:44:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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🛰🦊❤️ Orbital Fox Redux: Complete Mirror of Gemini Mailing List

2023-10-14 | #gemini #mailinglist | @Acidus

Given some of @solderpunk's recent work (launching geminiprotocol.net, updating the FAQ, etc.) I've been re-reading the spec and related documents, wanting to better understand some of the final bits that need clarification or refining. And a big part of that means understanding how we got here.

@solderpunk has some fascinating documents from the spring and summer of 2019, discussing many ideas that eventually crystalized into Gemini on his gopher hole:

gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/gemini

But pretty quickly after that, most of this discussion moved to the Gemini Mailing List.

The Gemini Mailing list was created in August 2019 and ran on the delightfully named Orbital Fox (orbitalfox.eu), or, in an emoji form that I'm just making up right now, 🛰🦊. With over 7700 messages across over 1000 threads, the mailing list documents the growth and design decisions around not only the Gemini protocol, but the entire community.

I have very fond memories of beach vacation in 2021 where, being so excited about Gemini, I stayed up one night past 3am reading nearly every thread on the mailing list. It helped me better understand how various parts of Gemini came to be, and even showed some evolutionary deadends (like hard wrapped text).

Unfortunately, the mailing list died in early 2022 due to a hard drive failure. Orbital Fox's hostname still resolves, but has nothing running on http:// or gemini://.

2023 is not like 2021

Given the depth and breath of discussion I remembered, I was sadden to find that in late 2023, it is surprisingly difficult to easily read the mailing list's content:

The HTTP Archive has a cached version of the mailing list [1], but it is slow, cannot be searched, and does not have archived copies of all the messages.
@adnano has a web-based version [2] that is better, but you can't sort the messages, you can't search the messages, and it doesn't properly group messages into threads, making for a hard reading experience.

Even if those were acceptable options, they are not available over Gemini, which kind of sucks.

The only archives of the mailing list I found in Geminispace were similarly less-than-ideal:

@sloum has an archive [3], but it only has posts from 2021, doesn't thread the messages together, and doesn't properly escape gemtext lines in the mailing list content which leads to all sorts of formatting problems.
@nervuri has all the posts [4], but saved as mbox files. These appear as a giant, unthreaded text file if you read them, or requires you to download them and use a local mail client. So this doesn't really count as "available over Gemini." Regardless, you can't share a hyperlink to a specific message or thread, which is important to do as work on the specification happens.

Building a better archive

To help other people be able to easily access and learn from this content, and given the shortcomings of other archives, I knew I needed to build an archive of the Gemini Mailing list that:

Is complete
Is available over gemini://
Correctly threads messages together
Allows linking to a specific message or thread
Is delightful to navigate and read
Preserves the formatting in the original emails
Is indexable and thus searchable from inside Gemini using a search engine such as Kennedy

So, for the last few days, over what is ironically yet another beach vacation, I took the mbox files and used them to generate such an archive. You can find it here:

Complete, threaded archive of the Gemini Mailing List

I took a lot of inspiration from @adnano's work on their web-based version. I especially liked their use iconography to show the number of authors or messages in a thread, and using a simple "1 page per thread" approach. To fix the threading problem I implemented JWZ's message threading algorithm and checked it against the Internet Archive's cached threaded view to ensure it was correct.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

I added some "ease of reading" enhancements, like the navigating to the next or previous thread, or message. I also created dedicated pages for each message so they be hyperlinked to in other discussions on Station, BBS, or personal gemlogs. Other, smaller improvements include notifying the reader when the thread subject changes, grouping threads into months and years, and keep threaded messages grouped even if the thread crosses over a year-end boundary.

Orbital Fox, the home of the Gemini Mailing List, may be no more. But hopefully this archive helps preserve all that content in an easy-to-read, Gemini-first, way. 🛰🦊❤️❤️❤️

[1] - HTTP Archive of the Gemini Mailing List

[2] - @adnano's web-based archive of the Gemini Mailing List

[3] - @sloum's archive

[4] - mbox files of the complete mailing list