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GemThread: an experimental conversation server

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

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

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

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

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

So as an experiment, I made one.

It is called "GemThread", and the current implementation is an SCGI service designed to run under Molly Brown. Anyone _can_ run an instance of 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 at the root of the gemthread service.

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

It could be that this is a poor fit for Gemini, but I think it checks off the boxes I had in my head. At the very least it's a stake in the ground for us to find a way to build out a way to have conversations without losing posts or having to monitor aggregators and hope we catch all the responses. :)

The first instance of the service is here:

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:

[1] Re: Comments and pingbacks

[2] GAMS: Gemini Acentred Messaging System