Unadorned Gemtext instead of syndication formats

[easeout at tilde.team]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 04:17:43PM -0400, Paper wrote:
> I am an author of a feed reader and I thought about implementing this
> after I read this, but there are some problems:
> 
> How should my feed reader behave if there are links to different paths
> on the page? I think I should reject all links from a different domain
> and from a different protocol, but there could be a link to the same
> domain, but to a different path.
> 
> => / back
> => /gemlog/1/ post 1
> => /gemlog/2/ post 2
> => /contact/ contact to me
> 
> Here, it is visible which ones are the blog entries and which ones are
> something else, but a program would have to guess. I don't think it
> would be a good idea to hardcode that everything with gemlog in the path
> is a feed item, that would cause too much confusion. Also, different
> clients would behave differently adding to the confusion.

I'm suggesting only a bare bones, dead simple, worse-is-better,
get-what-you-can-with-what's-on-hand version of syndication. I would
just collect all links on the page and not devise an intelligent way to
filter them, as if we were scraping web pages for only the good stuff. I
agree that would lead to divergent behavior among clients.

So let it be just the simplest possible implementation. The upgrade path
to a nicer experience would be for the author to publish RSS or Atom in
order to select just the right links for readers.

> It is a great idea, but I think we could instead write a script or a
> cli-program which would output Atom/RSS/Json feed for a gemini URL
> given. This program would do the neccessary guessing and parsing and
> output something that can be understood by all RSS libraries and
> clients. Some clients I know support running a command to get a feed.
> 
> Or we could just use gemfeed to generate Atom for us.

Generating Atom et al is the kind of thing many Gemini authors are
already doing (like me!), and those folks certainly don't need to worry
about this idea. When a feed is offered, I think users will prefer to
use it.

But if this takes off, new authors who haven't taken the step of
generating a feed will be more tied into the conversation already. For
instance, I was not going to get any blog replies or readership until I
did the work to publish Atom so I could then submit to CAPCOM. An 80%
solution would have helped me get engaged as a newcomer. It would also
help future users as Gemini's audience slowly broadens to include a less
technical crowd.

One more benefit for us early adopters: If we lower the barrier to entry
for others, it will mean more content for us to read and engage with.