Again on feeds in Gemini format

[Solderpunk]

On Thu Nov 19, 2020 at 7:45 PM CET, Drew DeVault wrote:

> This has been rubbing me the wrong way for a while now, and I mentioned
> it here:
>
> gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/11/15/RE-Is-this-aggregator-idea-good.gmi
>
> Gemini is simply not well-suited to discussions like this.

I'm not sure I agree that gemlog posts written in response to other
gemlog posts is not a good format, but the idea that something like feed
aggregation is the best way to follow this kind of discussion, and that
it should reliably provide a time-ordered list of all contributions to
the discussion, is clearly problematic.  It doesn't scale.  It's worked
quite well so far in both Gopherspace and Geminispace, but only because
both are so small that services like CAPCOM which follow everything are
still manageable.  If growth continues at current rates this will soon
start breaking down.  CAPCOM will become an indigestible fire hose.
People will start following only their own small set of feeds, and once
that happens the probability that you see anything other than a small
random slice of the conversation becomes very small and the whole thing
breaks even if posts appear in precisely the right order.

I still think it's a good idea when writing a non-trivial response to
something in Geminispace to reach out to the original author via email,
XMPP, Fediverse, whatever, to let them know.  Authors should feel free
to add a list of links at the end of their posts to responses which they
think are worthwhile interested readers reading.  People can pick up and
follow threads of conversation this way if they want.

I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life, but Gemini indeed
can't work equally well for all use-cases, and I personally (and I get
the impression most people in the Gemini community would agree) would be
happier if we designed things to work best for the case of somebody who
has subscribed to a dozen or so gemlogs on things they're particularly
interested in or by people they think of as friends, rather than for
somebody who feels a desperate need to read every last thing anybody
on the internet says in response to something.

Cheers,
Solderpunk