Date: 2020-07-04
On the subject of GUS, backlinks, and replies in Geminispace, I have a few thoughts about pros and cons of the approach.
One pro is that it "just works." Solderpunk called out in his post that one possible challenge with proposed implementations was that they could require content hosters to figure out a new framework, to "plug in" to the reply ecosystem, which would necessarily complicate the path to hosting your own Gemini presence. The GUS backlinks implementation will work with no effort on anyone else's part except for linking to the original content.
A con is that GUS indexing lags behind by a few days, so for quick discussion this is far from a realtime system. Maybe that's fine in the spirit of slowing down, but even with that kind of culture, I still imagine we will have short posts that beget other short posts. Maybe there is a way to make that faster, like if GUS crawled atom feeds more frequently than its full crawls, so that this sort of content got picked up and indexed more quickly.
Another con, at least for me, is that it doesn't feel super intuitive with the current "backlinks" nomenclature. And that's saying a lot, I think, given the amount of time I've spent thinking about them at this point. Maybe there is a mitigation of just improving the UI/nomenclature around this featureset, or building something on top of it where the backlinks underpinning is just an implementation detail.
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/replies-in-geminispace.gmi
gemini://carcosa.net/journal/20200529-some-replies.gmi
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~shufei/phlog/20200529-Reply-ProstheticConscience.gmi
Here is the link to this page's backlinks page on GUS. That means these pages (presumably) reply directly or indirectly to this post.
gemini://gus.guru/backlinks?envs.net/~vee/gemlog/2020-07-04-gus-backlinks.gmi