comp.infosystems.gemini

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Sun Jan 2 05:11:15 PM +0330 2022

This is not exactly news, but a Gemini group has been officially established on Usenet since what looks like late October. I remember reading about this on the mailing list, but since I have not touched Usenet in ages, I wasn't sure if I should bother.

Since the mailing list is now down, it was a good time for me to learn again how to work this thing. Thankfully, the first provider I found seems to be working well, and there was really no barrier to entry. All I had to do was create an account in Thunderbird and point it at:

> nntp.aioe.org

Enabling SSL will set the connection port to 563, which is supported by the service. Everything is working as expected.

After that, the next thing I had to do was subscribe to:

> comp.infosystems.gemini

Now I have something that is pretty much working like how the mailing list used to work. I briefly discussed Usenet as an alternative to the mailing list with orbifx today, and he said he would bring it up with Jason and Solderpunk.

From what I understand so far, the benefit of moving to Usenet would be higher availability through decentralization plus perhaps more exposure. I get the feeling this might invite spam as well, but I don't really know how people deal with that on Usenet. It seems like our group is in competent hands, though.

I encourage everyone to log in and say hello. It seems like a good and viable solution for the community. Prior to the mailing list going down, orbifx was even already running his own NNTP service, so there had already been thoughts of moving to this protocol.