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CAPCOM changes

This post is a somewhat overdue announcement about recent changes to the setup of the public CAPCOM instance hosted at gemini.circumlunar.space. I made the change a few weeks back, but there hasn't been too much yet in the way of visible consequences, however that will change tomorrow!

Once the public CAPCOM instance hit 100 feeds, I stopped accepting new feed submissions, for a few reasons:

However, after some feedback, I have decided to try something different, rather than leaving the instance capped at the first 100 feeds to have appeared.

CAPCOM is open for submissions once again, but instead of emailing your URL to me for inclusion, you can do it yourself with a Gemini query by following a link at the CAPCOM page (indeed, quite a few people have already done this!). When you submit a link, it gets appended to a file, which is allowed to grow as large as Geminispace does. On the first day of each month, a cron job runs the following pipeline to randomly select 100 unique feeds:

uniq submitted-feeds.txt | shuf | head -n 100 > active-feeds.txt

Those feeds are then aggregated by CAPCOM for the remainder of the month. This way the scope of the CAPCOM instance can grow without limit over time, but the actual amount of new content to be found each day should remain fairly constant over time. Each month will feature a random mixture of old and new capsules, so it should never start to feel "stale" after a long time. Importantly, if you find a capsule that you really love on CAPCOM, you should find some independent way to follow it, because it is not guaranteed to be included in the next month's sampling! Right now, there are 126 feeds included in the sampling pool, which means each feed has a roughly 80% chance of being included when the new sample is drawn on January 1st (and because the list is de-duplicated with `uniq`, you can't increase your chances by submitting your URL multiple times!). It's practically certain that some of the feeds you are currently used to seeing updated on CAPCOM will not make the cut and will disappear (of course, they may get shuffled back in at a future time). On the other hand, it's practically certain that some newly submitted feeds you've never seen before will show up to replace them.

In short, CAPCOM will offer you a slowly shifting random sample of what's happening in Geminispace. Poking your head in from time to time will be an excellent way to discover new capsules, totally uninfluenced by their age or popularity. However, it will no longer be an excellent way to follow any particular capsule long term (although, at least for now while the pool is fairly small, feeds have a good chance of staying in the rotation for several consecutive months). For this, you should either look into using a Gemini client with built-in support for the new Gemini page subscription standard, or run your own local version of CAPCOM, Spacewalk, gmisub, or similar software.

This change is going ahead because I honestly think it's best for the Gemini community as a whole, but I realise for some people this might not be a happy change. People who browse Geminispace primarily from mobile devices don't have as wide a range of clients to choose from in order to get good subscription support, and those platforms aren't easy places to use tools like CAPCOM. Some people using real computers may not have the technical skills to setup their own version of these tools. In light of this:

Before ending this post with some relevant links, I just want to say that checking CAPCOM every day is, by far, my favourite point of engagement with the entire Gemini project. It is basically *exactly* the community and the content I envisaged for Gemini and I couldn't be happier that it already exists. Thank you to each and every gemlogger who makes this space what it is - the frequently and infrequently updating, the verbose and the succinct, the serious and the whimsical. Let's keep it up in 2021!

CAPCOM software

"Classic CAPCOM" feed list

Spacewalk software

gmisub software

"Subscribing to Gemini pages" companion spec