[ANN] gemlikes - A liking and comment system for Gemini

Hello Geminauts,

I had this idea pretty soon after finding out about Gemini, and over
the past week or so I've finally managed to implement it.

Like many of us, I've really enjoyed reading and taking in people's
gemlogs on Geminispace. But I often want to reply to what people have
written, to ask a question, let them know I enjoyed it etc. I created
gemlikes to be able to do that.

It consists of three binaries, and works using CGI. This means you don't
have to run another server or anything, it should work with any server
that supports CGI. If it doesn't, please let me know!

There's a demo of the system available on my site[1], and the code is on
Github[2]. Most other questions like how to get it up and running, etc,
should be answered on that README.

1: gemini://makeworld.gq/gemlog/2020-05-21-first.gmi
2: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/gemlikes

I'm hoping that this can be "successful" in the Geminispace, and that it
won't just be my gemlog that uses it. If there's a feature that would help
you use it, feel free to let me know!


makeworld

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 11:39:07PM +0000, colecmac at protonmail.com wrote:
 
> Like many of us, I've really enjoyed reading and taking in people's
> gemlogs on Geminispace. But I often want to reply to what people have
> written, to ask a question, let them know I enjoyed it etc. I created
> gemlikes to be able to do that.

Thanks for sharing your project!

Somewhat like I said in my earlier post responding to the announcement
of Geddit, it will be really interesting to see whether or not this kind
of thing takes root in Geminispace, where it's comparatively difficult
(compared to the web) to control spam without making the user jump
through hoops (nobody is going to want to generate a client certificate
for each gemlog they might want to comment on).

Commenting is very rare in Gopherspace, although it is possible and you
occassionally see it.  By convention people respond either by just
emailing the author or by writing a response post of their own.  I have
read many people say that they really like this, because it encourages a
more carefully thought out and long form response than a comment.  Of
course, this second option (writing a response) only really works
because Gopherspace is small enough that there is a high likelihood of
the original poster finding your response.  It works well within small
communities, but does not scale.  Since Gemini does a very good job of
addressing just about all of the small irritations that people tend to
notice in Gopher, I am kind of hoping that it grows to be larger than
Gopherspace, and as such this cherished norm might break down.

In my experience the email thing works well, and lends Gopherspace a
very personal feel, which I enjoy.  That, too, might break down if email
address harvesting robots penetrate Geminispace in the future and people
don't want to put their address on their "about" page.

Who knows how things will pan out here.  I'd be kind of sad to see the
rise of a third-party Disqus-style solution here in Geminispace, but of
course I'm powerless to stop it.

Sorry if I sound down on all these cool new commenting and link-sharing
projects, I don't mean to me!  I'm really happy to see people pouring
energy and into Geminispace projects.  I'm just really curious to see
how all of this pans out in the longer term.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> writes:

> On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 11:39:07PM +0000, colecmac at protonmail.com wrote:
>  
>> Like many of us, I've really enjoyed reading and taking in people's
>> gemlogs on Geminispace. But I often want to reply to what people have
>> written, to ask a question, let them know I enjoyed it etc. I created
>> gemlikes to be able to do that.
>
> Thanks for sharing your project!

Yes, thanks. I've been pondering myself what is the best way to
facilitate discussions that span more than one phlog/gemlog. Apologies
if I end up hijacking this thread to do it.

> Commenting is very rare in Gopherspace, although it is possible and you
> occassionally see it.  By convention people respond either by just
> emailing the author or by writing a response post of their own.  I have
> read many people say that they really like this, because it encourages a
> more carefully thought out and long form response than a comment.  Of
> course, this second option (writing a response) only really works
> because Gopherspace is small enough that there is a high likelihood of
> the original poster finding your response.

This does mostly work in gopherspace, but there have been times I wanted
to write a reply (on my own phlog), but felt balked because I felt like
they wouldn't see the reply unless I was listed on one of the two phlog
aggregators that most people use, and I wasn't.

> In my experience the email thing works well, and lends Gopherspace a
> very personal feel, which I enjoy.  That, too, might break down if email
> address harvesting robots penetrate Geminispace in the future and people
> don't want to put their address on their "about" page.

I should probably make my reply email more prominent on my gemlog posts.

But what I was thinking about was something more similar to
Pingbacks[1]. I'm not interested in comments on blogs; I'm more
interested in something like what we have going in gopher, but with a
system for notifying authors that they've been replied to on another
gemlog. It looks like the current specification for doing this kind of
thing on the web is Webmention[2], which comes from the indieweb
community. I haven't put in very much thought into how I actually want
it to work, but I probably need to start by reading the Webmention
documentation. 

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+  
| Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray at carcosa.net  |  
| If someone conquers a thousand times a thousand others in |  
| battle, and someone else conquers himself, the latter one |  
| is the greatest of all conquerors.  --- The Dhammapada    |

It was thus said that the Great Jason McBrayer once stated:
> 
> But what I was thinking about was something more similar to
> Pingbacks[1]. I'm not interested in comments on blogs; I'm more
> interested in something like what we have going in gopher, but with a
> system for notifying authors that they've been replied to on another
> gemlog. It looks like the current specification for doing this kind of
> thing on the web is Webmention[2], which comes from the indieweb
> community. I haven't put in very much thought into how I actually want
> it to work, but I probably need to start by reading the Webmention
> documentation. 

  Both Pingback and Webmention use the <link> tag in HTML or a custom HTTP
header to indicate an endpoint to send a notification to.  It will be
interesting to see how you would work around the lack of such things in
Gemini.

  -spc

> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
> [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 05:02:01PM -0400, Sean Conner wrote:
 
>   Both Pingback and Webmention use the <link> tag in HTML or a custom HTTP
> header to indicate an endpoint to send a notification to.  It will be
> interesting to see how you would work around the lack of such things in
> Gemini.

Some kind of well-known endpoint convention comes to mind as the obvious
solution, although since this would need to be relative to the entire
domain name it wouldn't necessarily work well in a multi-user
environment...

Cheers,
Solderpunk

> there have been times I wanted
> to write a reply (on my own phlog), but felt balked because I felt like
> they wouldn't see the reply unless I was listed on one of the two phlog
> aggregators that most people use, and I wasn't.

I was thinking about this earlier, and the simplest solution might just be
to leave a comment that's just a link to your post. But obviously that
requires comments to already be a thing on their gemlog.

Some sort of webmention-type system would be cool, but only if it means
we can all see the webmentions, and it doesn't end up being a private message
to the author. Also, I worry about the complication of developing a whole
other mentioning protocol, since at first glance the existing systems don't
seem very transferable. I'd be happy to be wrong about that though.

makeworld

solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> writes:

> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 05:02:01PM -0400, Sean Conner wrote:
>  
>>   Both Pingback and Webmention use the <link> tag in HTML or a custom HTTP
>> header to indicate an endpoint to send a notification to.  It will be
>> interesting to see how you would work around the lack of such things in
>> Gemini.
>
> Some kind of well-known endpoint convention comes to mind as the obvious
> solution, although since this would need to be relative to the entire
> domain name it wouldn't necessarily work well in a multi-user
> environment...

Yeah, my plan was a well-known endpoint. It might be reasonable in a
multi-user environment for everyone to have to rely on a site-wide
Gemmention script.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+  
| Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray at carcosa.net  |  
| If someone conquers a thousand times a thousand others in |  
| battle, and someone else conquers himself, the latter one |  
| is the greatest of all conquerors.  --- The Dhammapada    |