gemini://soviet.circumlunar.space/oak/mailinglist/2.gmi

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:02:41 +0100

I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, and

thinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been around

for quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time and

thought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0k

and their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,

and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doing

this. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using

them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and

short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the

decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,

everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail

threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like

the archives for this mailing list, at

https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.

well-established system: e-mail has been around for way longer than

Gemini has. I know we all here love Gemini, but e-mail is going to

work better for a lot of people. There are already tons of e-mail

server setups and mail clients which people use - there's no need to

notifications: people subscribed to a mailing list get mails, and

everyone already checks their mail. There's no need to make new

applications to poll gemini pages to see if there are replies or

just as much variety in mail content: by default, we use text/plain

here, but MIME was created for e-mail in the first place. If you're

in love with Gemtext, just send text/gemini e-mails - we can read

Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /

libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is not

designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serve

information in a single direction. We must only use protocols for

things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing their

original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rooted

Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. What

P.S: If you don't like e-mail because it's too difficult to work with,

but you like UNIX / shell scripts, check out leahneukirchen's mblaze on

Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 14:17:24 +0000

On this topic, yet digressing a bit from Gemini, I started working on a

bulletin board (and more*) system that supports full interaction via email --

and only via email. The system is called friSBEe, where the SBE stands for

service by email. I created it at the beginning of this year but haven't

touched it much since. It's pretty raw, but also very flexible and could

easily be extended to support Gemini connections.

If you're interested in this, check out: https://rawtext.club/~frisbee/ And

feel free to contact me if you would like to test it out.

features include a BBS, a blog system, a choose-your-own text adventure,

messaging between users (yes, text messages on top of text email), and a few

On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 03:02:41PM +0100, nothien at uber.space wrote:

> I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, and

> thinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been around

> for quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time and

> thought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0k

> and their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,

> and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doing

> this. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using

> them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and

> short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the

> * decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,

> everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail

> threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like

> the archives for this mailing list, at

> https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.

> * well-established system: e-mail has been around for way longer than

> Gemini has. I know we all here love Gemini, but e-mail is going to

> work better for a lot of people. There are already tons of e-mail

> server setups and mail clients which people use - there's no need to

> * notifications: people subscribed to a mailing list get mails, and

> everyone already checks their mail. There's no need to make new

> applications to poll gemini pages to see if there are replies or

> * just as much variety in mail content: by default, we use text/plain

> here, but MIME was created for e-mail in the first place. If you're

> in love with Gemtext, just send text/gemini e-mails - we can read

> them, they're plain text.

> Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /

> libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is not

> designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serve

> information in a single direction. We must only use protocols for

> things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing their

> original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rooted

> Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. What

> P.S: If you don't like e-mail because it's too difficult to work with,

> but you like UNIX / shell scripts, check out leahneukirchen's mblaze on

Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 14:41:46 +0000

Oops, I meant to say I started on it at the beginning of *last* year.

On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 02:17:24PM +0000, cmccabe at rawtext.club wrote:

> On this topic, yet digressing a bit from Gemini, I started working on a

> bulletin board (and more*) system that supports full interaction via email --

> and only via email. The system is called friSBEe, where the SBE stands for

> service by email. I created it at the beginning of this year but haven't

> touched it much since. It's pretty raw, but also very flexible and could

> easily be extended to support Gemini connections.

> If you're interested in this, check out: https://rawtext.club/~frisbee/ And

> feel free to contact me if you would like to test it out.

> * features include a BBS, a blog system, a choose-your-own text adventure,

> messaging between users (yes, text messages on top of text email), and a few

> On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 03:02:41PM +0100, nothien at uber.space wrote:

> > I've been reading recent threads about message boards on Gemini, and

> > thinking about the idea of gemlog-based replies (which have been around

> > for quite a while now). People have been dedicating a lot of time and

> > thought to making messageboard-like systems work over Gemini (e.g. ew0k

> > and their CGI script for receiving notifications to replies to gemlogs,

> > and see the more recent threads), but I don't see the point of doing

> > this. We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using

> > them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and

> > short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the

> > * decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,

> > everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail

> > threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like

> > the archives for this mailing list, at

> > https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.

> > * well-established system: e-mail has been around for way longer than

> > Gemini has. I know we all here love Gemini, but e-mail is going to

> > work better for a lot of people. There are already tons of e-mail

> > server setups and mail clients which people use - there's no need to

> > * notifications: people subscribed to a mailing list get mails, and

> > everyone already checks their mail. There's no need to make new

> > applications to poll gemini pages to see if there are replies or

> > * just as much variety in mail content: by default, we use text/plain

> > here, but MIME was created for e-mail in the first place. If you're

> > in love with Gemtext, just send text/gemini e-mails - we can read

> > them, they're plain text.

> > Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /

> > libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is not

> > designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to serve

> > information in a single direction. We must only use protocols for

> > things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing their

> > original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but deep-rooted

> > Of course, I may be wrong. These are just my thoughts on this. What

> > P.S: If you don't like e-mail because it's too difficult to work with,

> > but you like UNIX / shell scripts, check out leahneukirchen's mblaze on

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:01:37 +0000

I've been making something like this to view mailing list archives that

It uses the sourcehut API to retrieve lists and threads and then uses

some simple formatting to display them as gemini pages.

I've opted to display all the email bodies as preformatted (like they

appear on sourcehut too) partly because of the way the lines are wrapped.

It's only experimental / proof of concept and I've only enabled it for

my own public-inbox list for now but yeah, it's here:

gemini://lists.grizzlybear.site/

Or direct link to the public mailing list:

gemini://lists.grizzlybear.site/~supergrizzlybear/public-inbox

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Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 16:43:17 +0100

Nicol? Balzarotti <anothersms at gmail.com> wrote:

> Right now, it's quite the opposite. Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co.

> control the vast majority of email addresses. Also, they don't like

> emails sent from dynamic ips. Try to setup a mail server nowadays. I

> have, but my internet provider gives me a dynamic ip. Fine? Nope, my

> mail is blocked by 90% of providers, even if my setup is correct and

> my score on [1] is excellent, google refuses to accept my emails. So

> here I am, sending a mail from a google account. Email was

> decentralized, now it is not. But if you can prove me wrong (host a

> mail server with a dynamic ip and being able to send emails to

> anybody) please do, I'd really like to ditch google mail.

> [1] https://www.mail-tester.com/

You're right, the situation right now is not ideal. But there are some

alternative solutions. For example, I'm using Uberspace, which is a

pretty cheap hosting platform. E-mails from my Uberspace address are

generally accepted by Google and the like. ProtonMail is also pretty

good (but you'll want emersion's hydroxide for IMAP/SMTP on free plans).

You could probably crawl through all the addresses on this mailing list

and find some suitable domains - I just did so for the last 2011 e-mails

on this list, with the following domains and counts of e-mail addresses:

But even if e-mail is not the right protocol to use, Gemini is

definitely worse. If you have suggestions beyond either one, please do

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:08:50 +0100

nothien at uber.space wrote:

> $ mlist us/list/gemini | mseq -S

> sed -e 's/^.* <$.*$>$/\1/' -e 's/^$.*$@$.*$$/\2 \1/' |

> awk 'BEG{p="";c=0}{if(p==$1){c++}else{if (length(p))print c,p;p=$1;c=1}}END{print c,p}' |

Whoops, missed "From" (thus missing mails never replied to). Adding it

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:14:02 +0100

nothien at uber.space writes:

> We already have e-mail based message lists, and we've been using

> them neatly for long-form (and to a lesser extent medium-form and

> short-form) discussions for a while now. E-mail has some of the

There's a major drawback in emails that render them useless IMHO:

> * decentralized / federated: there's no single source for e-mail,

> everybody has copies of the entire thing. People can also make e-mail

> threads, particularly of messageboards/lists publicly accessible, like

> the archives for this mailing list, at

> https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/.

Right now, it's quite the opposite. Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co.

control the vast majority of email addresses. Also, they don't like

emails sent from dynamic ips. Try to setup a mail server nowadays. I

have, but my internet provider gives me a dynamic ip. Fine? Nope, my

mail is blocked by 90% of providers, even if my setup is correct and my

score on [1] is excellent, google refuses to accept my emails. So here

I am, sending a mail from a google account. Email was decentralized,

now it is not. But if you can prove me wrong (host a mail server with a

dynamic ip and being able to send emails to anybody) please do, I'd

really like to ditch google mail.

[1] https://www.mail-tester.com/

Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 18:55:13 +0100

> On Jan 8, 2021, at 15:14, Nicol? Balzarotti <anothersms at gmail.com> wrote:

> Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co. control the vast majority of email addresses.

Yahoo? Is it a thing? In 2020?

You are conflating various underlying causes.

> Also, they don't like emails sent from dynamic ips.

Must email traffic is spam. And most of the work is to filter out spam.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420391/spam-email-traffic-share/

Therefore the challenge of using a random residential address to do anything. No one will trust you. Rightly so, as most of them are compromised.

The challanges of setting up your own email infrastructure lies there: trust.

https://www.spamhaus.org/organization/

On the other hand, one could totally setup an alt-mail service, old-school, perhaps peer-to-peer, among friends and family.

Just don't expect the rest of the world to interact with it.

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 14:19:23 -0500

nothien at uber.space writes:

> Instead of creating message board systems on Gemini, create servers /

> libraries to view e-mail archives on Gemini. I argue that Gemini is

> not designed to handle back-and-forth communication, but rather to

> serve information in a single direction. We must only use protocols

> for things they are well-suited to handle, otherwise we risk losing

> their original purposes and leave behind a fog of unhelpful but

I agree with the principle here, but there's another aspect to the

Mailing lists and NNTP are, of course, the correct protocols for fora or

message boards. But I think what people want here is different. Gemlog

posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world to read.

It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs in response

to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging community

before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded out by social

What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct analogue

of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of gemlog

posts responding to each other, but also get notification when your own

posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps may look

too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach to the

question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to do a

POST-equivalent over Gemini.

Jason McBrayer | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,

jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,

| but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?

| ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 20:36:17 +0100 (CET)

8 janv. 2021 ? 15:14 de anothersms at gmail.com:

> Right now, it's quite the opposite. Google & Yahoo & Microsoft & co.

> control the vast majority of email addresses. Also, they don't like

> emails sent from dynamic ips. Try to setup a mail server nowadays. I

> have, but my internet provider gives me a dynamic ip. Fine? Nope, my

> mail is blocked by 90% of providers, even if my setup is correct and my

> score on [1] is excellent, google refuses to accept my emails. So here

> I am, sending a mail from a google account. Email was decentralized,

> now it is not. But if you can prove me wrong (host a mail server with a

> dynamic ip and being able to send emails to anybody) please do, I'd

> really like to ditch google mail.

I used to run my own mail server* (the domain picked up in the following messages with listed domains - is mmn.name).? My ISP issues static IPs but honestly, that doesn't change the arbitrary blocking from the big providers.

However, you can use a smarthost while still hosting your own server(s).? Personally I use spamhero.com to manage in and outbound emails, and block off my mail server ports only to their IPs, it's a bit more expensive at 15$ a month.

If you just want SMTP relay, then duocircle (https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp) is free for 1 000 messages a month or 4$ for 2 500.? I've probably max sent 1 500 emails in a month at a peak, it's surprisingly hard.

There is, of course, your ISP's SMTP server, but that's a gamble, my ISP is geared towards advanced users hosting their own services so there isn't any weird restrictions on sender domains. Whereas other ISPs are more anti-that and will probably make every effort to ruin your life by blocking domains that are not their crap email domain.

It's kind of cheating the self hosted ethos, but it at least means you guarantee delivery.

= the server crashed for good and I was too lazy to fix it.? I still kind of do as my BBS is up and running and does still have to send and receive internet email.

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 22:14:05 +0100

Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:

> Mailing lists and NNTP are, of course, the correct protocols for fora

> or message boards. But I think what people want here is different.

> Gemlog posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world

> to read. It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs

> in response to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging

> community before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded

> What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct

> analogue of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of

> gemlog posts responding to each other, but also get notification when

> your own posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps

> may look too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach

> to the question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to

> do a POST-equivalent over Gemini.

I understand what you mean, but to be honest, I don't have a solution to

that. I can't think of a way of bringing that feeling that you've

described to a system that properly manages replies, because I think a

fundamental part of that feeling is that the posts-in-reply are actually

disconnected, and on another person's site. A system that notifies you

(e.g. via e-mail) that you've got replies seems to destroy that feeling,

partly I think because it's too similar to the social media that have

taken over the world. Maybe it's different for you.

On the other hand, I have another idea for the mailing list / forum

system I talked about: introduce self-hosted mail servers where only you

can introduce new (i.e. not in reply to anything) mails. Publishing a

new post is equivalent to sending it to the server, from where anyone

subscribed will get it. And on top of that mail server would be a

Gemini interface. One could introduce someone else's post (and the

entire associated reply set) into their own mailing list to "boost" it

like in Mastodon, or to just include their replies to it in their own

list. It sounds like fun to write - I'll get to it (the Gemini side;

there are already enough mail servers) when I can, but (anyone) feel

Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2021 21:57:22 -0000 (UTC)

On Fri, 08 Jan 2021 22:14:05 +0100, nothien wrote:

> Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:

>> Mailing lists and NNTP are, of course, the correct protocols for fora

>> or message boards. But I think what people want here is different.

>> Gemlog posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world

>> to read. It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs

>> in response to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging

>> community before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded

>> What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct

>> analogue of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of

>> gemlog posts responding to each other, but also get notification when

>> your own posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps

>> may look too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach to

>> the question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to do a

>> POST-equivalent over Gemini.

> I understand what you mean, but to be honest, I don't have a solution to

> that. I can't think of a way of bringing that feeling that you've

> described to a system that properly manages replies, because I think a

> fundamental part of that feeling is that the posts-in-reply are actually

> disconnected, and on another person's site. A system that notifies you

> (e.g. via e-mail) that you've got replies seems to destroy that feeling,

> partly I think because it's too similar to the social media that have

> taken over the world. Maybe it's different for you.

In https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/003299.html an idea

was that servers track client referers to present those referers to the

next visitors, but we do not have referers for very good reasons.

Sketching out the idea nevertheless ...

Interesting post b on server :b

Triggers person C to post her thoughts c on server :c with a link to b

Poster C visits post b via her own link from post c to post b

Server :b logs this referer, ie the URL of post c

On following visits of post b, server :b lists the logged referers

Server :b could pre-fetch refering content to check for appropriate

content, eg containing "## Re: " or "=> [own URL]"

Alternatively webrings were proposed, which does seem like the correct

Gemini way of doing it, though.

Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2021 11:15:13 +0900

I think XMPP's PubSub spec would be a great way to do this. Movim.eu

built an entire social networking platform on top of this. Not

everyone uses XMPP though, unlike email.

I think a public inbox to collect responses is the neatest way to

do this through email, at least the simplest. . You could just run

a script to parse the posts to the lists, optionally convert them

ti gemtext, and generate an index of all the responses.

I think someone recently posted something like this to the list

(or maybe it was another, or a dream! I'm to sleep deprived to tell!)

~mieum gemini://rawtext.club/~mieum/

Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:00:11 GMT

On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 02:19:23PM -0500, Jason McBrayer wrote:

>Gemlog posts are standalone documents that you put out into the world

>to read. It's a wonderful part of community that people write gemlogs

>in response to other gemlogs; it's very similar to the early blogging

>community before it became focused on monetization, and then crowded

>What people want in this case, I think, is not so much a direct

>analogue of a forum, but a way of collecting and following the set of

>gemlog posts responding to each other, but also get notification when

>your own posts are replied to. Maybe this set of conventions for apps

>may look too forum-like, but it is a good suggestion for an approach to

>the question of doing that kind of notifications without trying to do a

>POST-equivalent over Gemini.

This has been solved on the WWW through Webmentions. It should be

possible to bring this to a Gemini site, though perhaps not using the

Currently, if Alice writes a (micro)blog post responding to Bob's post,

Bob can get a notification or display Alice's response as a comment

under his post automatically. The result is something that can replace

silos like social media; everyone owns their own sites and talks to each

other, posting and repeating like Twitter or the various Fediverse

microblogging implementations.

To bring this to Gemini, Webmention software could simply handle

Webmentions with gemini:// URLs. The sending of Webmentions could be

done over HTTP, but the verification of Webmentions sent using gemini://

will obviously use the Gemini protocol.

I'll be working on something like ddevault's openring

(https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring/), but for saved Webmentions instead

of RSS feeds; I'll probably include an option for Gemtext output as well

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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:09:29 GMT

Also, to add to my last response:

Mailing lists also don't need to compete with alternatives, like my

aforementioned Webmention-based approach. If mailing list entries are

displayed alongside Webmentions or Webmentions get forwarded to the

mailing list, then we automatically get the best of both worlds.

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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 10:52:49 +0100

> Whoops, missed "From" (thus missing mails never replied to). Adding it

Just to a quick note of appreciation for your

effort to actually do the analysis.

My (very rough) summary gives the following

other commercial providers 17

domains with more than one sender 30

domains with one sender 134 (yay!)

I have now seen the argument:

"everybody uses gmail thesdays, sad, but you can't change that"

on a number of mailing lists and it is really

neat to see that this does not have to be the

I have two observations to make:

Loads of people who have been on the internet for

some decades remember the good old days fondly,

and are sad at what the internet (well, mainly web)

has turned in to. My view is that the good parts

of the internet are still there and are better than

ever - it is just that the good parts are completely

dwarfed by the amount of rubbish that is being added

So this is my theory of internet inflation (similar

"The bright stuff that matters is still there, but the

vacuous stuff (vacuum) in between is growing and

making the good stuff hard to find."

And I consider this list one of the bright points on

the internet, amongst the darkness of all the facebooglegram.

Then the second observation relates to the protocol discussions

here: A while ago some beginner woodworking article had

the (paraphrased) line in it:

"To get started, we recommend making your own workbench. And if

you are thinking of buying a workbench, reconsider if woodworking

So at the risk of being a elitist, I tend to take comments

on protocol nuances and extensions a lot more seriously

from a selfhosted email address, on the basis that the

poster has some form of experience/expertise relating to

running an internet facing service.

Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 22:14:10 -0500

It was thus said that the Great marc once stated:

> Just to a quick note of appreciation for your

> effort to actually do the analysis.

> My (very rough) summary gives the following

> other commercial providers 17

> domains with more than one sender 30

> domains with one sender 134 (yay!)

I ran my own analysys over the addresses to the mailing list (starting

from the start, August 14, 2019) and got the following:

Total unique addresses; 334

Domains that use Google: 20 *

Domains use a single MX host: 162 **

Includes gmail.com and other domains that outsource email to

** Only counted domains with 1 MX record, most likely self-hosted.

I don't think this means that everybody on this list uses gmail, but it's

probably more than expected.

Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 09:36:35 +0100

> On Jan 11, 2021, at 04:14, Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:

> I don't think this means that everybody on this list uses gmail, but it's

> probably more than expected.

Gmail is rather convenient for public forums, a bit like a burner phone for robocalls.

Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:14:50 -0500

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 1:00 AM Rohan Kumar <seirdy at seirdy.one> wrote:

> This has been solved on the WWW through Webmentions. It should be

> possible to bring this to a Gemini site, though perhaps not using the

This is really a very nice design. Here's my attempt to adapt it to Gemini:

1) Alice mentions Bob's post in a text/gemini document by posting her

response containing a link line to it.

2) Alice (or a tool that Alice uses) fetches Bob's post and scans it for a

link line whose text is (or contains) "Webmentions". If there isn't one,

Alice can't proceed. We'll call this the linkage URL. It can be absolute

or relative but can't contain a fragment.

3) Otherwise, Alice takes the linkage URL and appends

"source=url1&target=url2" to it in the usual way. That is, prefixed by "?"

if there is no query part already, or prefixed by & if there is. Url1 is

Alice's post and url2 is Bob's post. There is no need to %-escape either

of them. Note that this use of parameters is specific to linkage servers.

4) Alice then makes a Gemini request to the extended linkage URL. A 20

response means success, but Alice doesn't have to care what is returned

(perhaps an empty document or something human readable). The server

referenced in the linkage URL, which we will call the linkage server,

queues up the request for offline processing. This is important, as it

makes DDOSing more or less useless.

5) Alice can then do the same thing for all the other links in her post,

and then she doesn't have to worry about it any more.

6) At some future time, the linkage server referred to in Bob's post

6a) The server does some simple validation (url1 must be different from

url2, neither url must be "localhost", etc.) and makes sure that url2 is a

resource for which it is willing to accept requests. If any of this fails,

6b) The server makes sure that it hasn't seen this request before (if so,

6c) The server fetches Alice's post at url1 to make sure it really does

contain a link line that points to url2. If it gets an error other than

52, it can (but doesn't have to) queue up the request to try again. A 52

GONE request means don't try again, as Alice has deleted the post.

7) Exactly what happens next depends on how the linkage server works.

7a) The linkage server may notify Bob by email saying "Your post <url2> has

been linked from a post at <url1>.

7b) If the linkage server has read/write access to Bob's post (through the

file system, for example, or via sftp), it may create a link line to

Alice's post using the first "#" header line in Alice's post as the link

text, and append that line to Bob's post under a header line saying "#

Responses". This would leave a permanent record that anyone reading Bob's

7c) Or the linkage server can do (as they say on Monty Python) something

8) If Alice updates the post, she can repeat the process for any newly

9) More advanced client tools and linkage servers can cope with media types

9a) If Bob's post is text/plain, it can be checked for a line saying

"Webmentions: " followed by an URL; if Alice's post is text/plain, its body

9b) If Bob's post is text/html, it can be checked for a link or a element

whose rel attribute is "webmention"; if Alice's post is text/html, it can

be checked for a link, a, src, or video element whose href or src

9c) Linkage servers can be smarter and handle schemes other than gemini,

such as http(s), in which case they should follow <

https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/>, or gopher, or whatever.

A nice thing about this design is that Alice and Bob can do everything

pretty much by hand. Alice has to be careful to construct the right URL,

but if she messes up, nothing very bad happens. The linkage server is the

only part that has to be smart, and even then it is not all that smart.

Queueing up requests can be done by writing each one to a small file in a

directory, and they can be dequeued by reading a file from the directory

and unlinking it when it is processed. Alternatively the Posix batch(1)

command can be used to run a command that processes one request.

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org

Andrew Watt on Microsoft: Never in the field of human computing has so

much been paid by so many to so few! (pace Winston Churchill)

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