siiky
2023/01/09
2023/01/09
en
I don't know all the context because I'ven't been following Geminispace life but I noticed this thing about "mentions" today. Some of the relevant posts roughly in chronological order:
Why Though? (seems to be offline)
Have one's cake and eat it - likes, comments, backlinks and so on
Why did I work on gemini mention
In which I slag on the Gemini mentions proposal for half an hour
"The street finds its own uses for things."
I didn't take too much time reading everything in detail, but "Why though?" is also my thought.
I certainly won't be using it. For one, my capsule is hosted on SourceHut, so I couldn't use it even if I wanted. But most of all, I don't see the point. I know that if I had something like that, something others could use to let me know they'd linked to a post of mine, I would get FOMO and that's not cool. I understand this is very individual, maybe you get peace of mind by having this system giving you the latest mentions and whatnot, that's alright. For me, "what if someone replied but didn't let me know?" would be at the back of my mind too frequently, I can smell it. And that's another reason to ask "why though?" If your RFC, that you wrote for yourself, requires others to adopt it to be useful to you, then it's not much use, I don't think.
If anyone replied to, or wrote about, any of my posts in these (not so) recent times that I've been away from Gemini, I missed those. If such a mentions/notifications systems existed it's likely that I would have seen them. I would get the notification and feel the urge to read and reply. But there's a reason I've been away from Gemini -- time's been scarce around here and, unfortunately for me, it's not because I'm so very cool and have a life :'( With those notifications in place, I would either not resist the urge to read and reply, or, worse, resist the urge but feel bad about it. "Preso por ter cão, preso por não ter"[^1]...
(Sorry to anyone who wrote about/replied to any of my posts expecting a reply back; I have at least one email to reply to about my Overpass page; you know who you are, sorry...)
bacardi55 wrote:
Because I feel like it is painful to go and search for someone email on a capsule, or find a pseudo in an IRC channel. Many capsules don't show any contact info at all. Maybe some don't want to be contacted, maybe some other prefer not to put these type of data online and would prefer a more "discreet" type of solution.
If you want to be reachable, cool! I do too btw, that's why I set up a contacts page and a public ML. Though as you say, maybe some don't want to be reached through those other means. Maybe they use Gemini so they don't have to use those other means?
"Setting up" a contact means, even something as simple as a contacts page, is a conscious effort. Let's assume for a second that everyone in Geminispace wants to be contacted directly through some medium outside Gemini about their Gemini content. If they didn't take the effort of setting up something as simple as that contacts page, what makes you think they'll start adhering to your RFC, which is much more involved?
A possible counter-argument is that they don't want to be contacted outside Gemini but would still like to be contacted through Gemini (or at least learn of what others are writing about their own writings). That's fair. But how hard is it to scrape a handful of pages? That's a non-question, it's not that hard. With a wget/curl-like Gemini client, pretty easy[^2]; and you don't even need to do that yourself, see e.g. the gemrefinder CHICKEN egg by snan (different kind of approach). But hey, it's even simpler than that: Cosmos, an aggregator-like capsule that organizes pages in threads.
https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/5/gemrefinder
Szczeżuja wrote:
Some other aspect of this thoughts is also centralization. I like Antenna and Cosmos projects, and I'm using them on everyday basis. But I realised that they slowly go beyond being a content aggregate. The scattering of content, which was the initial state, also had some effect on all of Geminispace. The content were like that "capsules in the space", not distorted by any strong center. If you are interested in some topic, you will finally found it. Now content start to orbiting around that projects, which start to have some impact on it with a promise that this place gives the most appropriate / relevant / full content.
A good argument against relying too much (or exclusively, one could say) on aggregators, but this RFC doesn't seem to me to be the best approach around them -- indeed, it doesn't seem to be "around them" at all -- let alone the simplest. Something simpler has floated around in the past I believe: we use word-of-mouth, we each of us keep our own lists of feeds and interesting capsules, we share our lists with each other publicly, we encourage browsing the Geminispace and chance encounters. With these lists I doubt it would be hard to keep a personal aggregator with better "coverage" than the centralized aggregators we have. Having said that, of course I won't stop using Antenna, Cosmos, Callum's gmisub, etc, I sometimes find new capsules through these aggretors. But I don't rely on them, I keep my own list of feeds (that I don't currently share publicly, shame on me).
Another thing I think would be cool is if more people kept a reclog ("recommendations log"). That way, not only can we "follow" what others are reading, we can find interesting capsules we didn't know about before and read interesting posts. And it's really simple to keep, too.
Conman wrote:
If others find it useful, so be it.
In the end, this is basically it for me.
Reading back what I wrote it may give the impression I'm bashing on bacardi55 or others supporting their RFC, but that is not the intention at all! I'm trying to argue that we don't need such a system, that's all.
[^1]: lit. "arrested for having [a] dog, arrested for not having [a dog]", meaning roughly that no matter what I do the result is unwanted. One of these days I should start a dictionary page of PT idioms and expressions... There's a good idea for others of other countries! :) I know there are French, Swedes, Germans, Spanish, Swiss, Americans, Finnish, Russians, Serbs(?), etc around here! (sorry I can't tell Cyrillic languages apart)
[^2]:
gemget gemini://aggregator.com/ \
| egrep '^=>\s*[^\s]*\s.*