Not feeling it

Posted Wed 24 Nov, 2021.

I started adding Titan support to my Gemini server and it needs some heavy refactoring, but that's OK and will result on a cleaner codebase.

But then there was --yet another?-- bit of drama at Gemini's mailing list, big enough for me to notice despite not following the list any more. It kind of saddened me the lack of kindness on the conversation and a lot of aggressive gate-keeping (e.g. some people telling other what they should or should not do with their software; which includes strong opinions against Titan), which all together has put me off from working on SpaceBeans.

I've waited until that specific episode has cooled down before talking about it here. To be fair, it is likely me, that I'm not in the right mood for flames and controversy on something that is not that important in my life; and I get Gemini may be higher priority for other people.

Since then, looks like there has been a couple updates to the Gemini spec:

Speculative specification v0.16.0, November 14th 2021

First of all, I'm happy to see that Solderpunk is back actively contributing to Gemini and the spec. Not that it will help with some attitudes, but at least there's a clear BDFL that most people seem to respect.

Secondly, I haven't read all the details yet, but there's at least one point that is problematic to current SpaceBeans implementation:

> The use of the TLS `close_notify` mechanism is now mandatory (see sections 1.1 and 4)

I don't have a lot of control over the TLS stack, and this is a problem I identified early on. I probably need to give it another go, just in case I missed something, and then consider what is the future of my server if I can't follow the spec on that specific point.

The consequences of that may be important. It is unlikely it will affect anyone if this is the end of SpaceBeans, as I don't think anybody but me is using it; but I suspect my presence and interest in Gemini may be linked to my project.

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