2022-09-12

Musings on SmolZINE

I'm currently away from home. Vacation time! But I have brought my notebook with me --- which might turn against me ... I can even be online, but so far I have only checked gemini space and little else (wikipedia, online dictionary).

One of the sites I regularly read is SmolZINE (by kelbot)

gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/

For a while already I had been wondering, which capsules had been mentioned in there. And how many they were. So I made a few small data mining experiments.

clone SmolZINE?

Is there an easy way to clone SmolZINE? Like a 'git clone'? Hmmm. Looking at the index page doesn't promise anything. Asking a search engine? Nothing convincing. Asking github, gitlab, sourcehut manually? No dice. Ok then, I called my trusty download script

./ew.elpher-mirror gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/index.gmi
for N in $(seq 1 33); do ./ew.elpher-mirror gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/smolzine-issue-${N}.gmi ; done

That script is basically a wrapper around gcat[a]. And it is not fool proof. But it did the trick and created a directory with all issues. I have added all of them to my Library. I even edited the index to add the marker "non-official copy" to the text, and to point to the original site as well.

local copy

And since this capsule is publicly hosted at sourcehut.org, there is a clonable copy now.

Questions: is there a better way? Are there other copies?

[a] gcat on github

Data Mining shell style ...

With all 33 issues of SmolZINE at hand, how many links are in there?

$ for P in gemini gopher http https; do echo -n "$P "; grep -h "^=> $P://" smolzine-issue-*.gmi | wc -l; done
gemini 203
gopher 9
http 7
https 21

203 gemini links in 33 issues. Are there any duplicates in this list?

$ grep -h '^=> gemini://' smolzine-issue-*.gmi | LANG=C sort | uniq -c | sort -n | grep -v '1 => '

No, no duplicates. kelbot is careful to not even place a reference to the smolzine site itself in the issues! How considerate! So this amounts to 203/33=6.15 gemini links per issue on average.

And what is in this list now? Ok, I can look at the 203 entries. But I can try to extract the domain name of the capsules and see, whether some are mentioned a lot more than others

$ grep -h '^=> gemini://' smolzine-issue-*.gmi | LANG=C sort | awk '{print $2;}' | sed -e 's|^.*gemini://||' -e 's|/.*$||' | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
      6 warmedal.se
      6 tilde.team
      4 gemini.locrian.zone
      4 gemini.circumlunar.space
      3 transjovian.org
      3 tilde.pink
      3 skylarhill.me
      3 skyjake.fi
      3 republic.circumlunar.space
      3 rawtext.club

So two domains were mentioned six times, all others less than that. I had expected to see flounder.online, sdf.org, srht.site, pollux.casa and similar hosting sites on this list, but no. So to me it looks like that kelbot and his messengers do not have a favourite region in gemini space. Nor do they crowd in a particular corner. That's really nice in my humble opinion.

Please find the complete list of gemini:// links for your convenience:

/library/gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/gemini-links-in-smolzine-1-33.gmi

There is probably more to be discovered.

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