[ANN] GemThread: an experimental conversation server

[Raph M.]

> > Gemini is human-focused, which implies to me that building a complicated
> > network of automated pingback/webmention/trackback-like things might
> > also be a poor fit. "Overkill" is the word that comes to mind.
>
> I haven't actually published my notes on this, much less written an
> implementation (the last couple of months in my life have been *crazy*
> and all of my side projects have suffered), but one of the nice things
> about the design as it's coming together in my notes is that sending a
> geminimention can be done from any Gemini client by following a link and
> pasting a URL. That's not clear from what I've published so far, of
> course. One *could* automate it as part of a publishing workflow, but
> you don't have to in order to participate.

A couple things come to mind. The first is that my statement above seems
as if it could be a criticism of geminimentions, which I _absolutely_
did not intend! I am somewhat disenchanted with the way that some of the
indieweb technologies have grown from "small and focused" to "everything
including the kitchen sink", and I let that emotion creep into the
message. I actually quite like the idea behind geminimention and I am
very interested to see an implementation!

> Thanks for writing this. It looks pretty good; definitely easy to
> understand, and doesn't require self-hosting to participate. I think the
> goals of this and Geminimentions are pretty separate. My main goal with
> Geminimentions is to help authors be notified of replies (which requires
> the participation of the people replying, to be sure). This seems more a
> means of gathering replies into a thread, which is probably more
> generally useful, but also requires that all participants in the
> conversation be monitoring the same instance for replies...

My immediate thought here is that it would be easy and probably very
useful to create an automated hook in the GemThread service that would
call a geminimention URL whenever a response is added to a thread on a
GemThread thread. There is nothing in the GemThread implementation that
automatically notifies an author of responses, and I feel like that's a
pretty significant gap.

> Perhaps I'll publish my unfinished notes as a response on this thread...

That would be great! There seems to be an obvious intersection between
these ideas. I'd be very interested to see your notes!

Thank you for the response, and I apologize again if my message came off
as a criticism of geminimention. :)

Raph