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[tech] A '.well-known/' path for contact information?

Côme Chilliet come at chilliet.eu

Thu Jan 7 10:03:28 GMT 2021

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Le jeudi 7 janvier 2021, 02:36:04 CET Jon a écrit :

I've noticed a lot chatter recently about ways to allow comments on
posts. Sometimes the objective is to drop a message to the author,
sometimes to allow a public discussion.
I not personally interested in public comments, but I am very interested
making it easier for authors to be reached.
I've been wondering whether adopting a /.well-known/contact.txt
convention for sharing contact details. This idea has been blatantly
stolen from security.txt¹. This will allow for things like:
- automated back-link notifications for authoring tools.
- with client support, users to respond to a page from within the
client.
- and emails addresses could be harvested en mass for nefarious
purposes.

There is an email field in the certificate for this, I don’t know about other authors, but I put my email in the email field of certificates for my capsules.This does not work for multi-user domains, but as the rest of the thread shows, the *.txt solution does not easily support them either.

I also wanted to note that authors expecting comments by email using a specific subject syntax can just use a mailto link at the end of the article, and I’ve seen several gemlogs already doing this.Example: gemini://ybad.name/log/2021-01-02.gmi (this one even use a mailing list for commenting it seems)

Côme