The Backlinks Project

Disclaimer: if you participate, your log may get scanned, parsed, linked and possibly some content extracted!! Do not participate if you don't want this!

Motivation

In the expectation that every social communication across gemini-space may require someone to implement something on their server, to allow comments, to enable some form of content manipulation, the Backlinks Project serves as a proposition to solve this partially.

In my humble experience, keeping a link list, updating it, and scraping the content on the other end poses a far smaller challenge than actively maintaining a user database and upholding the rules a governmental body imposes on a site.

Backlink submission

Every log entry contains a backlink link. In this log's case it is:

and while it's strongly recommended to follow a generic pattern for this, I suppose this isn't mandatory.

The format of the backlink is simple: A full gemini link. That's it.

Audits

To prevent malicious links, it should be audited (manually or automatically) and approved before showing up on the site. This is probably up to you, how you'll tackle this.

Backlink embedding

Obviously the backlinks need to show up on your site somewhere. For a scraper to find it and detect a hierarchy, I propose to put it at the bottom of your page as the last headline. Like this:

Despite scraping all or some of the backlink texts, if the backlink is a full gemini url, a scraper will be able to find it. It can drop all urls that do not lead away from the current scraped site.