-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to sunshinegardens.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini; lang=en
i've been trying to find a better way to relate to social networking. not in the sense that other people are doing it wrong. i don't personally like how these things make me feel. i want to be able to talk to my friends and hear news that i care about, but i want a lot more control over what content i see and from whom i recieve it. i'd also like to be able to work offline and upload my posts when i run a sync job.
email is pretty much there already, with some small changes that could use a lot of UX polish it could be really good.
i also happen to think that email could make for a nice gossip network.
i've written a basic twtxt client in shell. a cron job that fetches the feeds listed in my tw.txt feed:
and all of the feeds listed in the feeds of my direct follows. this could recur up to a limit called hops, but doing that in this shell scares me. maybe i ought to port my programs to rc to regain a little sanity. using this local cache (refreshed daily) i can make various queries to display whatever timeline interests me. my stored queries aren't super interesting at the time of this writing, but i'm still experimenting.
the fetch-twtxt program supports http(s) and gemini feeds. i think it could be neat to write a cgi program that translates rss feeds or activitypub actors into tw.txt feeds using a registered user's credentials. it could do public posts, but i think auth-only is more in line with what i'm trying to do. really, there could be arbitraryily many gates that work like this.
navi separates reading and replying. this combined feed format is used to collate and summarize streams of information, but replies are always sent directly to a specific channel. navi can indicate the correct context and provide a shortcut to a reply action, but automatic cross-posting is a sin so it is important to avoid spamming the reply on channels that don't care about it.
i like this pattern.
one of the next steps i would like to take is to make a client that displays this collated information in a daily "newspaper" including attachments and everything. i really want to break the loop of posting and looking for replies. there is still excitement and anticipation, but i can't gratify it whenever i want.
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