-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to lasso.nytpu.com:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini;charset=utf-8
Lasso is a read-it-later service like Wallabag or Pocket, but for Gemini! It allows you to save Gemini pages (any textual content)
It is useful for "bookmarking" interesting articles to read later, and for archiving pages as they are now. The latter is particularly useful on Gemini, which has notoriously awful link rot. No more trying to go back and find some interesting post only to find the capsule is gone forever!
You can contact the instance admininstrator at the following address:
Signing up is literally two steps!
First, you have to make a "client certificate". Client certificates are how you identify yourself, similar to a password for sites on the Web. Many Gemini clients can generate client certificates for you, however, you'll need to read your specific client's documentation to see how to generate one.
After you have your client cert set up and your client configured to send it when visiting the Lasso capsule, then just click the "Sign In or Register" link on the Lasso home page; it'll prompt you for your new account username and then immediately create your new account!
There's a very practical reason: bulk-archiving content dramatically increases the amount of disk space needed to run the service (particularly if you archive non-text content such as images).
However, there is also a more ideological reason. Lasso was envisioned as being similar to Wallabag or Pinboard in the sense of being a bookmarking service, the archival functionality was added primarily to help combat the link rot prevalent on Gemini. It is the opinion of the author of Lasso that full archiving functionality is very out-of-scope for what Lasso is trying to be. It would also require much more thought into the ethical and legal ramifications of mirroring entire capsules worth of content.
Articles will stay in the "unread" category until you explicitly mark them as read. This is primarily because it can be very confusing to have articles move around after visiting them, for example if you mark an article as unread and reload the page, it will be re-marked as read.
It is also useful because you can read a portion of an article and still want it to be in the unread category. For websites such as Wallabag or applications such as KOReader, they can track when you reach the *end* of a document and mark it as read; on Gemini you can only determine when an article was visited, not where in the article you stopped at.
Sharing an article ("Publicly share this article" on the article's page) generates a unique link for that article that you can send to anybody, even if they don't have an Lasso account. Useful if the original article was deleted or the capsule went down, you can still have a copy to share!
Currently only textual resources (i.e. `text/*` MIME types) can be archived. There is also a 50.0 KiB (51200 byte) size limit *per article*.
Lasso is not an automated crawler, it only makes a single request to a URI a user explicitly specifies; it really is little different than any other Gemini client. It also does not follow any redirects, send client certificates, nor submit responses to forms (unless the user explicitly specifies a query string); and as such it is unlikely to be badly-behaved as many crawlers end up doing.
Adding client certs is too technical, requires getting the cert fingerprint and making sure it's in the right format — will fix at some point, but requires some thought on how best to do it and some architectural changes
Relative links in saved articles are broken — *may* fix at some point but requires parsing response bodies and doing link munging
You cannot import account data through the UI — won't fix: it requires using some secondary protocol that supports file uploads, it opens a *massive* attack surface, and it's potentially *very* destructive to account data
Lasso is Copyright (C) 2022-2023 nytpu <alex [at] nytpu.com>.
The Lasso software is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. It is offered without any warranty.
The source code of Lasso is publicly available here:
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