Domains And Cathedrals

The most recent excitement in Geminispace is about the domain `geminispace.org`.

Is it appropriate that it be used for Bubble?

Might it confuse newcomers into thinking it is somehow an “official” representative of Geminispace?

About the Domain “Geminispace.org”

Well—seems fine to me.

Domains have always worked this way; the coolest sounding names go to whoever registers them first, so they don’t carry much weight. With the proliferation of new TLDs I feel like the “first mover” advantage, if there was one, is long gone; and ironically that nobody really cares about domain names any more, just as nobody remembers telephone numbers any more. We use bookmarks, links, browser history and aggregators.

So `geminispace.org` will end up used as befits what it offers; just as any other destination on the internet.

Coincidentally, shortly before this I had decided that as it looks like I’ll be staying in Geminispace I should pick up a better domain than `clanmorgan.org`, which was just an unused domain I happened to have going spare.

To my mild astonishment, `gemlog.org` was available; perfect! I like `.org` domains. I know there are new TLDs for personal sites, but `.org` was the original.

I find that `circadian.gemlog.org` has a nice ring to it, so I’ll be moving my capsule there over the next few days. I like that I could add more gemlogs on different subdomains in the future, and I’ll keep the possibility open to use the main `gemlog.org` for something useful to the community.

The move is going to be a little rough: I’m serving from a single IP address, so as far as I can see the only way to get the certificates right would be to use SNI to serve the right certificate for the requested domain, but I don’t see an easy way to do that in Dart. I’ve used a squid proxy to handle it before, but I don’t think it’s worth it here.

So what will happen is that I’ll create a new certificate for `*.gemlog.org`, then `ciradian.gemlog.org` and `clanmorgan.org` will simultaneously start serving it. It will have the wrong Common Name for `clanmorgan.org`, so (some?) clients will complain. I’m not sure what crawlers will do. I’ll serve “permanently redirected” from `clanmorgan.org` pointing to the new domain.

The reason I won’t bother setting up a squid proxy to do this properly is the same reason I don’t think there is any problem with using `geminispace.org` for Bubble; I think domains just don’t matter that much. People will continue to find CircaDian via Antenna, Cosmos and the rest, just as they did before.

It’s true that there will be nothing in the certificates guaranteeing that `circadian.gemlog.org` is from the same author as `clanmorgan.org`. But if you can’t tell—does it matter?

Protocol Notes

While looking into my options for certificates I read a few posts on the subject, including:

Does a Gemini certificate need a Common Name matching the domain?

I tend to agree that with TOFU the client should not check the Common Name; in my case this would allow me to just use the `clanmorgan.org` certificate for `circadian.gemlog.org`, no problem.

I further agree with:

Your Gemini Browser and Server are Probably Doing Certificates Wrong

That the dates aren’t useful, either.

I suspect the precise situation today is more because TLS libraries usually come with these defaults than any particularly good reason. Oh well; room for improvement, I guess.

Cathedrals

We took the kids hiking today, and to some limestone caves. Here’s a picture I took of an extreme stalactite.

A Stalactite

Part of the cave system is described as a “cathedral”, and indeed it feels like a cathedral: vast, humbling. I particularly enjoyed the primary difference to human-created cathedrals, which is that is much, much older. It’s a nice reminder that the things we create, however grand, exist on tiny timescales to what the Earth is used to.

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