馃懡 skyjake

gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-01_cosmos.gmi

Occasionally people reply or refer to others' posts in Geminispace, but these threads of discussion are not really visible anywhere. I wanted to make something to help with this, so I wrote a new aggregator that tracks links between posts.

2 years ago 路 馃憤 bimzhob, kevinsan, martin, enceladus, gnuserland, cobradile94, lykso, kocka_collector, krixano, lunchboxhero_

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[1] gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-01_cosmos.gmi

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13 Replies

馃懡 skyjake

@wolftivy

Does the simplicity of Gemini make this easier?

Definitely. Since there are no inline links, it forces one to link more deliberately to other pages, making it less ambiguous to discover connections.

But the real foundation for this is the Gemini Subscriptions format. Without that, one would have to crawl the entire Geminispace, guess which pages are intended to be log posts, and find backlinks. It would be much harder to form meaningful discussion threads out of that data.

clients could pull from a service

Possible for sure, and could provide UX benefits for this narrow use case. I would prefer to keep clients more general-purpose, though. 路 2 years ago

馃懡 skyjake

posts are jumping between days

Looks like this is actually due to seveal source feeds giving a different timestamp to the same post, so depending on which one has been checked last, the thread moves around. Could be related to the lack fo timezones in gemfeeds, so dates can get a bit fuzzy. 路 2 years ago

馃懡 wolftivy

I just want to register how cool this way of threading is vs centralized fat web forums like reddit or hacker news. It makes the normal way of referencing things into first class threads. Does the simplicity of Gemini make this easier? Or is it just size and creativity? I wonder if clients could pull from a service like this to insert inline backlinks. 路 2 years ago

馃懡 skyjake

@gnuserland @enceladus @wolftivy Thanks! 馃檪

I noticed that a handful of posts were linking to themselves (馃し?) so they had become their own parents. These have been fixed and are now showing in the index.

Quick stats: database has 1881 posts from 79 feeds (some sources are aggregators and some individual gemlogs). 232 posts are part of a thread. 路 2 years ago

馃懡 gnuserland

that is clever! 馃憦馃憦馃憦 路 2 years ago

馃懡 enceladus

This is fantastic, really makes the gemini sphere beyond Station feel more like a community! 路 2 years ago

馃懡 skyjake

Hmm, looks like some of the posts are jumping between days (e.g., The Boston Diaries thread) every now and then. Likely a timestamp conversion glitch... I'm storing Unix timestamps in the database but converting to/from YYYY-MM-DD dates. 路 2 years ago

馃懡 wolftivy

This is great. Bookmarked. 路 2 years ago

馃懡 skyjake

@reidrac It's basically all the posts from the main aggregators like Antenna in one list. Posts that link to each other are grouped together so one can follow the discussion thread (or the series of posts from a single author). 路 2 years ago

馃懡 martin

This is awesome! Nice work 馃檪 路 2 years ago

馃懡 skyjake

Coincidentally, just noticed this with similar motivations:

gemini://gemi.dev/gemlog/2022-01-11-launching-mentions.gmi 路 2 years ago

馃懡 bimzhob

wow - an embryonic thing of beauty. thanks for building this! 路 2 years ago

馃懡 skyjake

Test successful: it found this reply thread on Station. 馃槉 路 2 years ago