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BBS, née Geminispace.org, was launched exactly one year ago today. I figured it would be fitting to take a brief look at the past 12 months. Hopefully this is useful as an introduction to newcomers as well as something to reminisce about for those who have been here since the beginning.
Introducing: Bubble and Geminispace.org
Before the launch, one thing that made me hesitate was that, as a father of two young children, my time and energy are rather limited when it comes to leisure activities, so is committing to a new project sensible given that I consider Lagrange as deserving most of my attention?
This was partially behind the technology choices of having the bulletin board be implemented as an extension to my Gemini server and writing it in Python, a high-level language that lets you get a lot done quickly and easily. Looking back, this was probably the right choice, because without a low friction project, the busyness of daily life — taking care of a baby — risked me getting detached from Geminispace. I know from previous experience that week-long breaks can turn into month-long ones, and suddenly a project has completely exited working memory and resuming it requires some dedicated effort.
Another concern was the relationship to Station, the original Gemini microblogging capsule. Functionally, BBS is pretty much a direct superset of Station and could serve a similar purpose in Geminispace. I didn't want Station to be abandoned, though, further worsening centralization in the network. Thankfully, Station continues to thrive thanks to its approachability and large user base, and with BBS around for longer-term topic-based discussions, Station can remain more personal and generic which suits its feature set well.
I am generally pleased with how BBS has evolved and matured over this time period. It has proved to have some productive utility, too, in the form of software issue tracking, at least for myself with Lagrange, Bubble and GmCapsule, and @Addison with /s/Rosy-Crow-Issues. I hope it has been and will continue to provide some necessary connective tissue in the Geminispace community, as one of the centralized channels that balance the decentralized self-hosted essence of Gemini.
"Bubble" is the name of the software that powers this capsule. It is a Gemini-based bulletin board system that can be summarized as a union of Station, Reddit, WordPress, and issue trackers like GitHub Issues.
Below I've summarized the Bubble feature updates over the past year. There have also been several patches that were applied silently save for a minor version bump on the Settings page.
2023-05-23 Bubble v2.0: Special Commands, Notification Improvements
The first update focused on enhancing the core features of Bubble, like making notifications more reliable and having them persist for a week after having been viewed, and added special commands to make posting and commenting more flexible. User account and subspace renaming was also added.
2023-05-30 Bubble v3.0: Thanks and Reactions, Private Mode, Improved Issue Trackers
The second update came only two weeks after launch, continuing quick iteration of the basic feature set. Credits go to @Morgan for the idea of the private Thanks feature, as a way of indicating one's appreciation without any risk of it becoming a public popularity contest.
2023-06-06 Bubble v4.0: Muting, Tag Filters, Monthly Archive
The third update continued rapid development by adding new ways to personalize your feeds.
2023-06-20 Bubble v5.0: Comment View, Index of Posts, Time Zones, Certificate Recovery
The initial development phase ended with the remaining essential features: viewing individual comments (and the partial discussion thread following them), index pages of all posts and comments by a user, and ways to recover your account in case you lose the client certificate.
2023-07-18 Bubble v6.0: Atom Feeds, Expanded Help
Atom feeds were added as an additional format for user and subspace feeds.
2023-11-12 Bubble v7.0: Subspace Views, Grouped Posts, New Feed Options and User Actions
After a lengthy period of just fixing bugs, the November update made substantial changes to the Bubble UI, with post grouping and new ways to view subspace activity. New feed types were also added, including a Unified Timeline for mixing comments together with new posts, and the Activity sort order was added for keeping track of old posts with recent comments.
2024-01-10 Bubble v8.0: Flairs and Locked Posts
2024-01-15 Bubble v8.1: Flair Composer, User-Defined and Moderator Flairs
The January updates gave moderators more capabilities to keep discussion in check, and also enabled users to more prominently express details about themselves via the flair system.
Credits to @jeang3nie for suggesting the new name.
In July, I started publishing monthly archives.
Bubble archives use the Gempub format that is basically a ZIP archive with some .gmi files inside. You can view these directly in Lagrange or unzip the files and open them with any Gemini client.
I happened to be asleep while the attack was ongoing, and had a busy morning implementing new admin tools to clean up the mess. In hindsight, a simple rollback of the database to an earlier backup may have sufficed. The motivation for the attack was likely retaliation after I deleted a few racist derogatory remarks.
After the malicious posts/reactions were deleted, an account approval policy was implemented.
In November, a better solution was introduced for keeping the front page balanced.
Automatic post grouping prevents a single author/subspace from dominating the feed in a more dynamic and fair way.
In January, the US politics subspace and moderation policy were added.
Discussion about politics is prone to devolving into flamewars and talking past each other.
The live "/stats" page was added.
In addition to the total number of registered users, the Statistics page shows how many have ever posted or commented, and how many have done so in the past 30 days. I'm not actively following these metrics, though. Comparing to the only recorded data point (on January 16), today's activity is down roughly 20%, but that level of fluctuation seems normal for Gemini based on what I've seen on Cosmos.
Also in January, following a series of negative interactions and violations of the Code of Conduct, the Flairs system and post locking were introduced to improve moderation capabilities. Flairs were soon expanded to enable users to give themselves customized descriptions.
I consider this first-generation incarnation of Bubble now mature enough to be serviceable for the next few years as is. It is always difficult to predict exactly what the future holds, but I would be quite happy even if Bubble never gains another feature again. (Which is unlikely, though.) This is to say, as the availability of my time increases over the next months and years, I would rather focus on Lagrange as my primary project, while doing small feature updates to Bubble here and there.
Perhaps the biggest missing potential feature that has been discussed is federation with other Bubble instances. One of my initial motivations for starting the project was to convert the skyjake.fi capsule into an instance of Bubble, and have my gemlog and (what became) BBS interoperate while remaining separate entities. This kind of federation has the potential of giving us the best of both worlds: there are the individual capsules living their own lives, but they can also work in unison as a larger collective community. However, while this is great as an idea, the technological cost gives me pause. Especially with Gemini, the attraction to simplicity is a concrete and beneficial factor, and constructing an elaborate — albeit not as elaborate as ActivityPub — mechanism on top seems counter to the ideals of Geminispace. I would expect federation to be on the back burner for a while, and if it comes to pass, it will probably be a minimum viable kind of implementation rather than something that makes separate instances truly feel functionally like a single place.
And with that, I hope your stay here on BBS and in Geminispace at large remains a pleasant one. Let's use our time to build small, nimble things that never aim to take over the world. 🥂
May 13 · 4 months ago · 👍 jsreed5, Addison, innerteapot, freezr, mediocregopher, november, gemalaya, ian, lanterm, meidam, decant, leoperbo, mio, 072004 · ❤ 1 🎉 4 🔥 2 🤘 1
Wow, has it really been 1 year already? Thanks for the contributions to gemspace btw.
Feels longer than a year for me...
This was a great read; thank you for providing a year in perspective. It is indeed hard to believe that BBS has already been around for a year. I wasn't aware that trolls had attacked BBS in October! Since I run a public chess service on my capsule, I worry the same thing will happen there someday. Thank you for your work, and here's to many more years of BBS!
@skyjake you really pushed Gemini on another level, thank you very much for your dedication and commitment...
And thanks god to have make you so talented and clever!
🙏
It is certainly the biggest and the most sophisticated piece of Gemini software I've seen, and it's amazingly robust! Maybe Python isn't as terrible as I think... Where is that My-hat-is-off emoji...
Thanks for the mention re: thanks, but more than that thanks for implementing it :)
I was sceptical at first as to whether Bubble would be useful / interesting / engaging enough to thrive. But you've done a fantastic job both running the BBS and adding new features that people want, at this point I would call it a solid success. Congrats and thanks again :)