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Last updated 2023-04-08.
For keeping up-to-date with gemini capsules you already know to be interesting, following feeds is a great way to avoid missing anything they post.
Atom is sometimes used, but "gemtext feeds" are the most common and most widely supported by clients and aggregators:
Following feeds has a few drawbacks though:
You may browse gemini on separate devices. You will generally have to subscribe to feeds on all your devices and mark every post as read on every device.
Potentially for other reasons as well, having attention-grabbing notices in your client for every post may not be what you want.
You only see posts from feeds you've subscribed to. It doesn't assist in any way with discovering capsules.
The tooling is still pretty immature compared to large web feed tools. You're currently out of luck for example if you want to group feeds by tags/topics or maybe specify different polling frequencies for different groups of feeds.
One of the best ways to discover capsules and posts on gemini is aggregators. There are still a pretty small number of aggregators on Gemini, and they use different models so it can be beneficial to use multiple.
Antenna is an aggregator on more of an active model. It does no proactive aggregation of its own, rather it requires post authors to re-submit their own feed URL any time the content has changed. This makes it really good at staying current and avoiding link-rot from old feeds, as well as capturing everything from participating authors.
This is (probably?) the oldest aggregator and inspired by the design of a gopherspace aggregator. It maintains a listing of feed URLs (523 as of this writing), selects a random 100 of them each month, and throughout the month lists all posts from those 100 feeds. This makes it effectively a random sampling of geminispace.
Capsule authors have to take action to get their feed included in CAPCOM, but it's simply a matter of posting to a URL in the CAPCOM instance one time (ever).
There seems to be a problem of author-abandoned feeds in this model. I suspect there isn't any purging of feeds which don't resolve, or any mechanism to clear feeds which aren't seeing any new posts any longer. I'm writing this on 2023-04-08 and currently there are a total of 3 posts from the month of April, the newest being from 4/3. Purging down to fewer feeds would actually increase the aggregated posts in this model, since every month it would be aggregating from 100 *active* feeds.
The CAPCOM software is also available for download so you can run your own public or private instance.
This is the simplest aggregation model from the big 3 listed up to this point. It keeps a static listing of aggregated feeds (199 as of this writing) and simply lists everything found at all of the feed URLs. It relies on a simple cron job to fetch feeds and update the listing.
As a capsule author, to get your feed included you simply have to email the owner.
The gmisub software is available for download as well.
Spacewalk is simply a listing of feed URLs, but it continuously sorts them by last update. So it can be a good re-entrance if you haven't caught up in a little while.
Again here the source is available for self-hosting.
Cosmos is essentially a meta-aggregator. It uses other aggregators as sources, fetches the posts, and builds trees of posts and their responses based on links between them. This is really valuable because it's the only place I'm aware of that allows you to follow conversations across gemini directly.
It also includes posts and comments from Station and Geddit.
These are basically the same. I believe they source their geminispace indices differently, but in both cases you put in your search query via a gemini "INPUT" prompt and get a similar looking results page.
From skyjake, bubble is the open-source software, bbs.geminispace.org is the original (only?) instance.
A new (launched 2023-05-13) social hub by skyjake - author of Lagrange and Cosmos. It has a few offerings included:
a per-user feed which can function either like a gemlog or a tinylog
user-creatable and moderatable sections of the site, much like subreddits
comments, likes, polls
Station is a centralized social-network-sort-of-thing. Users can maintain multiple identieies, make posts, give thumbs-ups, and post replies (more as comments than standalone posts). It looks to me (not sure?) like posts are plain-text only, not actually supporting gemtext. But the whole thing is built in Gemini.
Geddit rebuilds the reddit model (albeit one single "subreddit") in Gemini. Users can post links to outside pages (or use the URL of Geddit itself for the sake of just seeding a comment thread) and then post comments beneath it.
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