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

[Jason McBrayer]

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    |