2023-10-14 | #gemini #mailinglist | @Acidus
Given some of @solderpunk's recent work (launching geminiprotocol.net, updating the FAQ, etc.) I've been re-reading the spec and related documents, wanting to better understand some of the final bits that need clarification or refining. And a big part of that means understanding how we got here.
@solderpunk has some fascinating documents from the spring and summer of 2019, discussing many ideas that eventually crystalized into Gemini on his gopher hole:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/gemini
But pretty quickly after that, most of this discussion moved to the Gemini Mailing List.
The Gemini Mailing list was created in August 2019 and ran on the delightfully named Orbital Fox (orbitalfox.eu), or, in an emoji form that I'm just making up right now, 🛰🦊. With over 7700 messages across over 1000 threads, the mailing list documents the growth and design decisions around not only the Gemini protocol, but the entire community.
I have very fond memories of beach vacation in 2021 where, being so excited about Gemini, I stayed up one night past 3am reading nearly every thread on the mailing list. It helped me better understand how various parts of Gemini came to be, and even showed some evolutionary deadends (like hard wrapped text).
Unfortunately, the mailing list died in early 2022 due to a hard drive failure. Orbital Fox's hostname still resolves, but has nothing running on http:// or gemini://.
Given the depth and breath of discussion I remembered, I was sadden to find that in late 2023, it is surprisingly difficult to easily read the mailing list's content:
Even if those were acceptable options, they are not available over Gemini, which kind of sucks.
The only archives of the mailing list I found in Geminispace were similarly less-than-ideal:
To help other people be able to easily access and learn from this content, and given the shortcomings of other archives, I knew I needed to build an archive of the Gemini Mailing list that:
So, for the last few days, over what is ironically yet another beach vacation, I took the mbox files and used them to generate such an archive. You can find it here:
Complete, threaded archive of the Gemini Mailing List
I took a lot of inspiration from @adnano's work on their web-based version. I especially liked their use iconography to show the number of authors or messages in a thread, and using a simple "1 page per thread" approach. To fix the threading problem I implemented JWZ's message threading algorithm and checked it against the Internet Archive's cached threaded view to ensure it was correct.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
I added some "ease of reading" enhancements, like the navigating to the next or previous thread, or message. I also created dedicated pages for each message so they be hyperlinked to in other discussions on Station, BBS, or personal gemlogs. Other, smaller improvements include notifying the reader when the thread subject changes, grouping threads into months and years, and keep threaded messages grouped even if the thread crosses over a year-end boundary.
Orbital Fox, the home of the Gemini Mailing List, may be no more. But hopefully this archive helps preserve all that content in an easy-to-read, Gemini-first, way. 🛰🦊❤️❤️❤️
[1] - HTTP Archive of the Gemini Mailing List
[2] - @adnano's web-based archive of the Gemini Mailing List