Comment by 🚀 stack
@spc476: uh, yes, but I have no clue what the browser will do with that. Will it just silently take the user to the new location, and stump them with an unknown certificate? Will it update bookmarks? Will it strip the query string as the spec says, which is by the way problematic for my application?
Also, I may want to communicate a message in addition to redirecting, which I probably always will want to do.
I'd say it was probably not worth putting into the spec. It is always a bad idea to move too many things too often, and if you do, this just introduces a huge amount of complexity as you now need to maintain redirects in addition to the real pages, in a yet different way. It requires messing with the server config (judging by the servers I've seen), which a tilde user can't do, for instance.
Gemini protocol is a zoo of how not to do things generally. Gemtext in particular -- there is only a handful of things you can do, but each one is triggered by one, two, or three characters, sometimes requiring space, and occasionally, a closing delimiter. Sometimes I think it's a joke, let's see if anyone notices.
But I love it anyway for some reason, like an ugly three-legged stray dog on the edge of starvation, which for some unexplainable reason is incredibly cute. I will feed it hoping it won't drop dead.
2025-11-27 · 5 months ago
7 Later Comments ↓
I second using permanent redirects for this. Clients should update bookmarks, CDG will automatically update, and I guess search engines will treat it sensibly too. Much nicer than a "please (manually) update your bookmarks" page, in my opinion.
🚀 stack [OP/mod] · Nov 27 at 23:26:
Well I understand the sentiment, but I do not entirely agree. I cannot predict what browsers will do, and want to actually make sure the visitor understands that the page has moved, and is prepated to accept the new, unknown cerificate. As far as I am concerned, a message and a link is a very nice thing, as opposed to being suddenly flung somewhere else with an unexpected certificate emergency.
The spec should have provided for this: a message, whether redirect should be taken or the user given a chance to confirm, and how to communicate that bookmarks should be updated. Or better yet, since we are munimalists after all, just not bothered with redirects.
I do not care what search engines do.
Automatic redirect makes more sense in an intra-site move, I suppose.
However I will reiterate that since this is a meta operation there is no way to redirect without modifying the server configuration. As I see it it makes it inaccessible to the average Joe with a tilde account.
@stack Right, a message could be useful for giving fingerprints of the certificate of the new server, so users don't have to trust it blindly. It is a shame there's no automated mechanism for that... maybe clients should automatically trust the certificate of the target host of the redirect if it's signed with the same public key as the host serving the redirect, but I guess no client does that currently. As for how to serve redirects on a tilde, couldn't you do it easily with a cgi script?
🚀 stack [OP/mod] · Nov 28 at 18:48:
@mbays: re certificates signed with same public key... Do you mean private key?
I've looked for tildes with CGI, and they are few and far between. I've used 3; 2 shut down and one was often so slow (due to someone running stupid python jobs that destroyed performance). I wound up just paying $5/mo because it became too frustrating to deal with such randomness, even though I am using less than 1% of the resources on my VPS...
@stack Yes! And I see.
🚀 stack [OP/mod] · Nov 28 at 19:31:
I suppose my point is that if you control the server enough to run CGIs (or have your own server or servers), you have a choice of how to treat your visitors; if you don't (which includes maybe 90+% of active geminauts), you can't easily redirect anyway and have to put up notices and links... Given that distribution, and vagueness of what to do upon redirect, the redirection spec is actually dragging us down... We would be better off coming up with an ad-hoc gemtext that specifies redirection that is recognized browsers and search engines but is human-readable and actionable.
And I'll give you the same advice I gave everybody that wanted a feature to Gemini back when the mailing list was active: Just Implement It! If I hadn't gone off and written the first Gemini server (even before Solderpunk), Gemini might have died as an idea on his gopher site.
But as for regular users adding redirects, well, the Apache web server had solved that particular issue, but I'm guessing none of the Gemini servers have picked up on the idea.
Original Post
Fornax deprecator — As I prepare to move to a different server I want to make that transition easier. Last time I had to hunt down all the urls that people were pointing to (for all the different games and gemlogs), and manually sticking in notices that I am moving to a different server. So I created a simple fornax server which responds to any request with a gemini page (conveniently, index.gmi in the directory specified when starting the server). This file can contain the directions to the...