Again on feeds in Gemini format

[cbabcock at asciiking.com]

November 19, 2020 12:08 PM, "Solderpunk" <solderpunk at posteo.net> wrote:

> 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.

You can't always give everyone what they want, but this might be an exception. Use date-only on the original post. Use T and time - minute granularity, author is responsible for converting to UTC, no TZ indicator needed or allowed (in the spirit of 'we use this spec, but not all of it') - when referencing a reply. Original posts will always sort ahead of replies, while replies generally sort in order and can be easily removed from a feed

Chris