The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, January 06, 2023

“The street finds its own uses for things.”

There's a little bit of pushback on the whole Gemini mentions concept. Sandra wrote:

I had Atom and was pretty happy with that and people were like “why don’t you implement Gemini too” and I did and it was a bee and a half because back then almost no Gemini server supported different languages for different pages without serious hoops and then gmisub and then broken redirects and then dir traversal and then this and then that and then the other and after a while it’s all hacking and no writing.

…

I really, really don’t wanna implement this and that means either there’s a non-zero amount of grumpy grognards who don’t wanna do it (in which case you’re gonna have to use the other methods anyway, like Cosmos), so there’s no point in doing it, or I’m gonna get dragged kicking and screaming into doing it which I really hope does not happen.

I think bacardi55 is cool and I haven’t wanted to say anything about the project out of the “if you can’ [sic] say anything nice…” principle but then it seemed as if it were picking up steam and getting implemented.

Gemini mention, an ongoing discussion

I'm not familiar with the “was a bee and a half” idiom, but I suspect it means something like “annoying,” given the context. And if supporting Gemini was “annoying” then why even continue with it? The issues brought up, like the lack of per-page language support, were found by people trying to use Gemini, finding issues, and solving the issues. It would have been easy for most of the issues to be ignored, thanks to Gemini's “simplicity of implementatin über alles.” That would not have been a good idea long term, and thus, Gemini gets complex.

And Gemini mentions aren't mandatory, just like not every website supports webmentions. Don't like it? Don't bother with it. Taken to the limit, “I really hope does not happen” applied to Gemini means Gemini doesn't exist (and there are plenty of people who questioned the concept of Gemini).

And as bacardi55 said:

The main reason I "jumped" into this "issue" can be reduced to one sentence: I did it for me :)

Why did I work on gemini mention

If others find it useful, so be it. As William Gibson said: “The street finds its own uses for things.” Besides, given my past experience with the Gemini community, I think there will be only two sites supporting Gemini mentions.

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