I was reading carcosa.net's "Re: Comments and pingbacks" article [1], and I ended up thinking about what sort of conversation pattern makes sense in Gemini-space.
Gemini is decentralized (which is different from "federated", and I'm happy about that), and this implies to me that a conversation pattern that fits into Gemini-space should necessarily be decentralized.
Gemini is human-focused, which implies to me that building a complicated network of automated pingback/webmention/trackback-like things might also be a poor fit. "Overkill" is the word that comes to mind.
I wanted something decentralized, lightweight, and participatory. It should require only a small amount of interaction from each person that wants to use it. And it should be something that can be self-hosted, but doesn't have to be.
After a bit of searching, I came across the GAMS specification [2]. I liked the spec, but wondered if it might be possible to make an even simpler conversation system.
So as an experiment, I made one.
It is called "GemThread", and the current implementation is an SCGI service designed to run under Molly Brown. Anyone _can_ run an instance of it, but nobody _must_ run one.
The interaction pattern should feel relatively straightforward.
To create a new thread:
To respond to a thread:
There are more details available in the help file, which is published at the root of the gemthread service.
Comments, criticism, and feedback are all welcome. I set up a mailing list for it at mailto://~raphm/gemthread@lists.sr.ht .
It could be that this is a poor fit for Gemini, but I think it checks off the boxes I had in my head. At the very least it's a stake in the ground for us to find a way to build out a way to have conversations without losing posts or having to monitor aggregators and hope we catch all the responses. :)
The first instance of the service is here:
The code is hosted at:
https://git.sr.ht/~raphm/gemthread
It is also mirrored at:
https://github.com/raphm/gemthread
Thank you for reading!
Raph
References: