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I recently wrote a post about why I consider AuraGem Search to be mostly a failure:
This post has prompted my looking back at AuraGem's development history and what I've been able to do on this capsule.
AuraGem used to be called Ponix and it used to be mostly Gopher-first. It was originally intended to be another pubnix system, but that never took off. It was, however, one of the first 50 capsules created for Gemini. At that time I was fully on board with Gemini and excited about it. So I started a new server named Ponix.
Unfortunately, I don't remember much from this time, hence the name "lost beginnings." What I do remember is that I had a Gopher server at this time, and that Gopher server had a Sefaria proxy and a YouTube proxy. Unfortunately, all of the code and information was lost when my Raspberry Pi's SDCard died. I don't remember what year this was, but it might have been earlier in 2021, I'm not sure. I did end up relaunching Ponix and re-writing much of the stuff that I had, this time in Gemini first.
One of the first things I did for the rewrite was a thing that I still use even today: the YouTube Proxy.
It used the YouTube APIs to search, list channel pages, playlists, videos, and downloading was in there in some form very early on. I wanted something like this because I wanted to be able to watch videos without all of the clutter of YouTube's web interface, which often uses too much memory, even today, and can be quite slow. My methodology at the time was to move the most used services from the web over to gemini so that I could fully eliminate the use of my web browser. This didn't pan out because the web remains useful for lots of information that is simply not on Gemini, even today.
The next addition was a mirror of the Odin docs. It has been removed since then for various reasons, but it was definitely helpful. Gemini still needs docs for most programming languages, which is unfortunate because Gemini is tailored for content like this, imo.
The Github Proxy was next:
I regret that I haven't yet finished this, but you can currently see repos, their issues, and view the files in the repo, which is still pretty useful.
The month after, I launched a Multics Pubnix that I was excited about. I got a couple people on there, but it was a large failure. I did write some useful docs for it though, and it was fun spending lots of time studying the Multics manuals:
In an attempt to bring more information to Gemini, I also started Starwars docs for the Disney Canon:
This still exists, and since then I've created a database of Starwars information. For a while this database version was removed because I lost all of the database information, but earlier this year I used the gemi.dev archives to bring back some of the content (and added a bit of new content):
One of the things I did with this starwars database was create code to auto-generate tables in preformatted blocks. You can find the code for that here:
I also had an older weather service that used OpenWeatherMap. I later switched this to IQAir in around 2023 because it offered air quality, and OpenWeatherMap was giving me problems.
Within the very same year I started work on a new search engine that was intended to be an improvement over Geminispace.info. This was before Kennedy and TLGS existed, and I was quite frustrated with geminispace.info's interface and search results. This was the first big project on Ponix/AuraGem, and I was very exited for it. Over time, I became less excited, unfortunately, but I do think I learned a lot from implementing this search engine.
The search engine started with a concurrent crawler that crawled all links but cached the content from just gemtext pages, and common music files a little bit later on. It had keyword extraction, and hashtag and mention caching soon after, and gave document titles in the search results. It deliberately didn't cache the full contents of pages and it didn't use FTS at the time, which led to slow search results.
Later in 2021, within the same year, I improved the Search Engine to start respecting robots.txt and Slow Down responses, and I made sure it didn't get caught up in redirects. The Search Engine also came back after some downtime under the new capsule name, AuraGem.
I remember being in the Geminauts XMPP with benk who helped me come up with and settle on the name. I wasn't 100% sure about the name at the time, I think, but now I quite like it. It's unique, but not so out there like Ponix was.
In 2022 I put more of an emphasis on information in Gemini, to great failure. I was desperate for more information in Gemini so that I could actually do research and normal searching in Gemini without having to go to the web. Sadly, this just never became a reality; Gemini is too focused on blogs and social media that all of the work mbays did with games, many of the few podcasts that were served over Gemini, Wikis, and other work on search engines and information access are largely pushed aside and ignored for more aggregators and directories of more blogs. I did try though, and I started by writing this article urging for more development in information access:
So, in an attempt to add more information to Gemini, one of the first things I added was religious texts:
The challenging thing about the Sefaria proxy is that bold is used extensively in translations of the Talmud to visually distinguish between explanation and translation. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz's translation puts explanation of the translation inline with the translation itself. The translated parts are in bold, and the explanation of the translation are in normal text - sorta like what's done in the Amplified Bible, but even more explanation. Other older Bible commentaries do this as well. Using bold is standard here, but gemtext doesn't technically have bold. Regardless, I still used markdown bold syntax, but the results are pretty awful in clients that don't support this.
I desperately needed more information in Geminispace. At the time I was just so done with more and more Gemini blogs. There is a reason I never did much blogging in Geminispace, and it's mainly because I felt like I needed to focus on non-blog content. Gemipedia and Transjovian's Wikis were great additions. Gemipedia took off, but Transjovian didn't seem to. But we did get Titan, an upload protocol, and it allowed me to do something that I was very excited about at the time...
I wrote a music storage service for Gemini:
You could upload mp3s, the tag data would be stored in the db, and then you could listen to your music straight from Gemini, and your library was categorized into artists and albums. Because this service felt a lot like services on the web that were frequently monetized, I wanted to make sure I got across that this is a completely free service, and it remains free even today. Over time I've added cool features like infinite streams that shuffle the music from your library, and streaming entire albums at a time.
In an attempt to yet again bring more information, this time in a Q/A and Stackoverflow service, I wrote AuraGem Ask, which was another failure.
The interesting thing I added to this that I quite liked was the ability to answer questions with a link to a gemlog post. I mainly added this to reduce centralization, and the feature is still there even today. The other idea I had that was never implemented was to cache the content from these links as well, in case they went down. Unfortunately, this service went down when AuraGem went down due to not having a domain name paid for, and then I largely removed it during a rewrite, until I brought it back ealier this year. AuraGem Ask was the last thing I did for 2022.
While I took a long break away from Gemini to focus on finishing University and other projects, the domain for AuraGem, which was auragem.space at the time, ended up expiring and I didn't have money to buy it back again. In September I ended up starting the server back up with a new free domain, which is the current domain. AuraGem has been up ever since this, and I intend to keep it up and running. This is when I lost a lot of data in the database, including the Search Engine and Star Wars database data. I also lost all of the database data to AuraGem Ask.
The relaunch was mostly fixing all of the existing things, and removing outdated things like the Twitch proxy.
I started three bigger projects in 2023 that I was quite proud of: AuraGem Music's Public Radio, my Misfin Server and Client, and SIS.
All of these projects started around the same time, near the relaunch of AuraGem. The Public Radio had a schedule where the genre of music tried to match the time of day. For example, I put classical during the times when older people get up earlier, around 5-7 AM. I scheduled Pop and Rock for the times when most people would wake up or when they would be at lunch, and I scheduled Piano and Blues for when most people go to bed. During the night was World music and other less mainstream genres (including BeOS music). Eventually I expanded the number of stations, but I still tried to keep to this form of scheduling for all of them.
Smallnet Information Services was started in 2023, but has not yet been officially released, and I started really using it in early 2024. It was a project inspired by Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) in that it is intended to be a suite of servers for smallnet protocols (gemini, nex, spartan, gopher, etc.) that could be managed and set up from a Gemini admin interface. I switched AuraGem to using it in 2024.
In 2024, I shifted focus. I was very much done with gemlogs in 2022, but in 2024 I was just done with Gemini Social Media in general. I put my effort into helping satch and mk270 create a new Misfin spec that hopefully improved on misfin: Misfin(C). I also updated my server and client implementations so that it would support both misfin(B) and Misfin(C). I added mailinglists, including "federated" mailinglists, and a few other things, and I also implemented parts of satch's GMAP for accessing one's misfin messages from a server (much like IMAP and Pop3).
I started the "Freedom of Protocols" initiative that was intended to expand AuraGem into other protocols. AuraGem is not available on Nex, Gopher, and Spartan, and the Search Engine will crawl Nex. I intend to finish this out soon so that the crawler will crawl Spartan as well, but I started shifting my focus onto a new protocol that I have created: Scroll.
I then started writing a series analyzing Gemini's design:
While I was generating ideas on the Scroll Protocol, I started a new graphical browser. It was originally created to rival Lagrange. Lagrange is a great browser, and it has been the most popular and a big staple in Geminispace. New users tend to get redirected to Lagrange, it has the most features and the best user interface. But it's not good that there is no other competition in the graphical gemini browser space. I don't view Kristall or Castor to be much competition. Someone needs to compete, and I already wanted to write a graphical browser for Gemini a few years ago anyways, I just never got the chance.
So now we are here, in mostly present times. Now that Profectus is in Beta, I am putting more focus back onto the Scroll Protocol, and I started with a diverging of values:
What the diverging values mainly boils down to is a reduced emphasis on minimalism and a larger emphasis on the simple expressiveness necessary to really create a library. Scroll also takes a document-centric approach where Gemini has largely become text-centric.
AuraGem has had a lot of failures and very few successes. The Search Engine had interesting ideas, but it was largely ignored by Geminispace ever since its beginning. AuraGem Ask was barely used, and then it went down for a long period of time, and when it came back up, it still lacked users. The largest failure is that AuraGem went down too many times. However, it seems the services that really catch on in Gemini are blogging and social media. Mbays' games didn't get a lot of users, as far as I know; Transjovian didn't get a lot of users; AuraGem Music has virtually no users. But of course Bubble and Station and the endless aggregators and directories of blogs all took off.
I would like to pretend like it is just AuraGem that was a large failure, but that's not reality. The failures of geminispace are far deeper and more expansive. Gemini apps didnt take off. The music that used to be here, particularly Konpeito, was taken down and access only comes through mirrors and caches. Drew Devault left and that was fairly big news. There were podcasts served over Gemini other than Benk's podcast, but they all left. Gemini's growth is completely stilted now, and there's almost nothing new coming out, and certainly no new information services, except more aggregators and directories, of course.
If I were to look back on my article about Information on Gemini, what I see is lack of growth:
> Here are some information categories that are still missing from gemini: philosophy, info about zoroastrianism (avesta.org) and other religions, public domain books, information on books, unicode searching, Man Pages (there used to be a page for this, but it is now down), docs for other programming languages.
Gemini still doesn't have philosophy, info about zoroastrianism and other religions, or public domain books, information on books, a goodreads/thestorygraph-alternative, song lyrics service, docs on other programming languages, or a replacement for the old man pages. But great, we have Bubble now. Fine.
So, I officially welcome everyone who wants to work on information, rather than social media and blogs, to the Scroll Protocol. Built a Search Engine for Scroll? It will get added to the Scroll Protocol's homepage in an instant, because it's valuable here, regardless of who you are or what you've done.
I intend to build a directory on the Scroll Homepage to increase discovery of scroll sites (scrolleries), and people can submit links to it. Having this in early on is very important for Scroll's growth, and will hopefully shift focus away from people creating their own directories and towards other more necessary things.
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