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Fumble Around! A New Gemspace Discovery Service

On this May Day I set myself a challenge: create a gemini discovery service in a single day. Here are the results!

Fumble Around - Gemini's Simplest Discovery Engine

Obviously Fumble Around (FA) is quite inspired by ye olde StumbleUpon, may it rest in peace. Unlike StumbleUpon, FA does not require an account, nor will it ever start cannibalizing the user experience for ad money. It's a simple, sleek, pro-bono service for the gemini community.

FA is still rough around the edges, and the page selection mechanism could use tuning. More than anything the service needs folks to add links to it. I've spent the afternoon seeding it with some content I find interesting, but obviously a wider range of viewpoints and familiarity with gemspace would go a long way.

You can find the submission link on the homepage, there's no signup or limits or anything. Go nuts! Any page is fair game as long as it's a gemtext page served over gemini. It doesn't have to be a capsule's homepage either; if a specific post or sub-page catches your interest then throw it on there.

Of course, being a one day project, there's some features that got left on the cutting room floor:

Addition of some kind of flagging mechanism, so pages can be flagged as inappropriate, broken, or spammy.

A deadlink checker, so the db can be kept tidy. There's a hack in place to deal with dead links on the fly, but as time goes on a better solution will be needed.

Caching of upstream pages, to reduce load on the upstream servers as well as to reduce loading times.

Database export tool, so the dataset is publicly available.

As mentioned on the homepage, please shoot me an email with any bugs, requests, or questions. I'd love to get some feedback on this.

Happy fumbling!

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Published 2024-05-01