Federating over Gemini

2022-01-13

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I've been trying to set up a local Fediverse instance, partially to test out its functionality and partially to learn how to set up a proper Web server. I haven't had much success on either front so far. The concept of the Fediverse, however, made me start to think. Station has proven to be a popular service, and previously I've looked into twtxt as a microblogging protocol.

I began to wonder: could some of these ideas be adapted to create a federated network on Gemini? The leanness of the Gemini protocol could make such a system robust, portable, scalable, and easy to manage.

Imagine suites of capsule software--dedicated servers, standalone programs, or even CGI scripts--that parse twtxt files or standardized flight logs, collating them as full posts in a timeline rather than simply a series of links. Tildes and other hosting services could allow users to create their own "feed" files or logs, then federate with others to create a protocol-wide network. This would give the simplicity and functionality of tools like Station, plus the ability for separate capsules to communicate directly without needing to rely on aggregation services to know when a reply has been written.

If a common format for flight logs was (voluntarily) agreed upon, using a separate format like twtxt might not even be necessary. In such a case, given just an Atom or RSS feed, capsules could follow the links in the feed, parse the posts, and put their contents into a timeline. This would allow federated network-oriented posts to sit comfortably alongside the current blog-style posts in Geminispace, avoiding the possibility of fragmenting content between fundamentally-different data formats.

Since tools are already being built to handle log aggregation and track cross-capsule links, there might not be much interest in something like this. It's also true that to me, part of Gemini's charm is that communication in Geminispace is dominated by dedicated-thoughtful blog-style content rather than short, throwaway comments in the style of Twitter or Facebook.

Still, I might try putting together some scripts sometime, just as a proof of concept.

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[Last updated: 2022-01-13]