💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › satch › 20889 captured on 2024-12-17 at 15:25:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re: "Threaded View in Misfin Clients"
@skyjake @jecxjo I have to say I see things a little bit differently. I don't want to contribute to any tension here, it would be really silly to get heated over whether threading is complex or simple or minimalist enough or whatever, but I just want to be clear about a couple of things.
Misfin(B) was intended to be email-like in that it would support multiple recipients and therefore group conversations. It was also compared to email more than any other type of pre-existing protocol and was pitched as 'email for the small web'.
Misfin(C) keeps with Misfin(B)'s spirit by being equally easy to implement and even less extensible.
Everything we are building on top of Misfin(C), from threading and mailbox verification to inbox search and mailinglists, is outside of the core Misfin(C) protocol and while these things serve useful functions, they don't increase complexity for those who want to keep things as technically simple as possible.
What we have is freedom to choose. Everyone can talk to one another using misfin, and just because I use threading and my server verifies that your mailbox exists before accepting messages doesn't mean that you need to implement those things. You are welcome to use a little bash script to send all your messages if you like, and read your incoming messages from the server logs just like we did a couple of years ago. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I say all this because it's actually really important to me to maintain the lightweight approachability of misfin that makes it so much more fun to hack at and play with than something heavier like email. I don't think that's at risk.
Cheers!
Oct 15 · 2 months ago
@clseibold @satch my comment was never about the complexity and the ability of the community. it was about reflecting on minimalism because one should look at the community's needs and actions.
Look at the gemini client situation. we have dozens of clients with 90% covering the bare minimum. No titan support which honestly is needed to do heavy lifting, most only take one line inputs and don't support new lines so using BBS is a pain. SmolWeb is going to be pet projects that slowly become abandoned so maintaining minimalism in protocol and use helps keep the community alive when the code isnt.
When a misfin client doesn't support threading what will that look like? A huge mess of messages.
Threaded View in Misfin Clients — Since I have covered verification within misfin, I also want to cover how I have implemented Threaded view, and some other considerations that need to be made for Threading. Note that this is a client-side consideration, and has been partially implemented in misfin-server's client gemini interface, rather than the server itself. Threaded view tries to organize messages into threads based on a common topic. It is useful not just for responses to private...