[tech] [spec] On extending gemini

[colecmac at protonmail.com]

Thank you for chiming in mozz, I appreciate it.

 > Unless he submits, unwavering, to ddevault?s ultimatum to "fix" his software.
 >
 > And it worked.

Not just yet! I take back my initial quick decision to remove them. I hate
having to go back and forth on this, but I think it's important.

As the developer of Amfora, I'm genuinely unsure what to do here. I feel
uncomfortable at being at the centre of this, but also intrigued at what this
means for Gemini and its future.

I'd like to make a small correction to your email:

 > No, the threat is to blackhole the IP address of every amfora user, cutting
 > them off from a large swath of gemini and thereby crippling the client.

Drew's idea would only blackhole Amfora users who had enabled the the favicon
feature, which is off by default, to respect Gemini's one request philosophy.

However this is still a tactic I strongly disagree with, and although Drew said
(on IRC) he considered "banhammering" a last resort, I don't think it should be
on the table at all for clients that are not causing any server problems.

To be honest, I am leaning to keeping the feature, because it's what I want, and
it's my client, goddamnit! If Drew still says he will go ahead with the
blackhole then I will add a manual exception for his domains. This is obviously
an ugly thing to do, reminiscent of WebKit Quirks[1], but I don't see another
option.

1: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/page/Quirks.cpp


Feel free to subscribe or watch #199 for Amfora-specific updates on this.

https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/199


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