Synchronizing bookmarks - Request for comments

[colecmac at protonmail.com]

Hello,

I was initially excited by this email because I thought it was proposal
for how to share bookmarks across clients on the same machine, similar to
Drew's idea for TOFU. But it seems it's about synchronizing bookmarks and
subscriptions across the network, using the Gemini protocol.

First off I appreciate the write up, it's nice to have these longer-form
ideas in Gemini. Secondly, I think this misusing the Gemini the protocol
and is outside its scope. I think this is similar to how Gemini doesn't have
a clear way for authors to send files to a server. If you want to push data
to a server, I think Gemini is not the thing to use.

While I personally don't have the need to synchronize my Gemini bookmarks
and subscriptions, several Amfora users have told me that they synchronize
their Amfora data and settings, and they do so through external means as one
might expect. Git repos mainly, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about people
using sftp, rsync, etc. I don't think this bespoke protocol would be advantageous
to these people.

Obvious these are technical solutions, but I'm biased because Amfora is a terminal
based client. But I think that synchronizing files across the network is already
a technical operation, and a more user-friendly option like syncthing would
still work fine for people.


To answer the questions directly asked:

> Would you consider implementing support for something like this?

Not really, for the reasons I explained above. I'd be happy to hear why you think
I'm wrong though.

> Does your client have some kind of plugin system which would allow a third-party
> to add support?

Amfora does not. It's an interesting idea and I'm open to it, but I'm not entirely
sure how it would work, or what sort of things the plugins would hook in to.


Now, I don't want to hijack your thread... but if anyone is interested in a common
format for Gemini bookmarks as I mentioned earlier, an Amfora user proposed[1]
XBEL[2] to me, and I plan on implementing it in the next-next release, replacing the
TOML format being currently used, which was a bad choice for that purpose. Is
this something other client authors would like to do as well?


1: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/68#issuecomment-674424896
2: http://xbel.sourceforge.net/


Cheers,
makeworld