News----good, bad, ugly? You decide (was Re: [spec] comments on the proposed gemini spec revisions)

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Alex // nytpu once stated:
> I agree.  The fact that there was very lively and active discussion on
> the spec that immediately ceased and stagnated after the move to gitlab
> serves to prove that most people agree with my opinion on gitlab and are
> unwilling to participate there rather than the spec being "done."  A
> community doesn't immediately shift from "we have to talk about these
> issues" to "oh it's finished we're done" in the span of five minutes.
> Especially when you take into account how many of the issues have no
> sort of resolution and the misleading comments have gone months without
> being countered.
> 
> Considering that I was **not allowed to create a gitlab account** due to
> "browser checks" means that even if a lot of people were willing to
> create an account they were probably stuck and unable to participate.

  Back on April 17th of this year, I wrote the following to solderpunk:

	I've had time to think about it, and no.  I don't want to take it
	over, nor do I want to continue finalizing the specification(s). 
	I'm will to hand over the protocol specification, and the gitlab
	tracking system, to the next person in line.  As far as I'm
	concerned, I don't have it in me to work further on Gemini---there
	are too many people with too many divergent opinions on how it
	should all work.  My thoughts on protocol design have also changed
	since I started, but I haven't solidified the thoughts on it yet. 
	Gemini itself seems to be chugging along, yet the community that's
	there now is not necessarily one I would join (it's not good or bad,
	just different than what I expect).

  And on April 18th of this year, I got the following reply from solderpunk:

	Thanks for giving it some thought and getting back to me. ...
	
	I'm not 100% sure what I'll do now instead, but that's entirely my
	problem.

  Why the long delay in saying "I quit"?  Because I was hoping for
solderpunk to make an announcement first, but well ... THAT never happened. 
I then decided to wait and see what happens.

  Nothing.

  Other than insults the past two weeks.

  Not ONE person here who had showed interest in finalizing the spec
bothered to reach out and say, "What's up with the spec?" or "Are you still
working on the spec?"  or even "Hey! Haven't heard from you for some time."

  Nothing.

  Yes, solderpunk offered to hand the entire project off to me, so to
Stephane Bortzmeyer who said:

> (Not documenting thing is a common way to keep power.)

  Sorry, I'm not into keeping power.

  And to nytpu:

> I thought I was way overstepping my bounds when suggesting multi-level
> lists for Gemtext in my post but now people want to de-facto require
> full-fledged markdown in Gemini clients; my simple and miniscule
> suggestion doesn't seem so bad now lol.

  When solderpunk handed control over to me to finalize the spec, the ONE
condition he mandated, was, and I'm quoting here:

> I don't want to move from single level lists to up to three-level lists.
> 
> I think at this point I'm happy to defer to you on the rest of these.

  A hard NO from solderpunk himself.

  So the Gemini protocol has been adrift for the past seven months.  I'm not
working on it anymore, and I haven't since April 17th.  Unless you (the
collective you, not any single person) can rope in solderpunk, you're on
your own.  Move the discussion off gitlab, I don't care at this point.

  Oh, and one more thing---my Gemini site has been down for the past few
days.  Why?  Mainly because I got tired of poorly written Gemini bots stuck
in my redirection tests for *weeks!*  If the authors don't care that their
bots are wasting time and resources on following endless redirects, then I
don't care about outing these idiots.  These are the top 10 bots over the
past four weeks:

   2155 remote=35.177.211.100
   1876 remote=52.56.164.254
   1764 remote=107.10.102.253
   1686 remote=35.178.189.57
   1652 remote=18.170.67.76
   1615 remote=13.40.12.172
   1576 remote=18.134.157.124
   1536 remote=18.169.104.124
   1498 remote=13.40.24.31
   1412 remote=18.134.208.115

  Of course, there are over 580 bots that have followed those redirects 100
or more times in the past four weeks.

  -spc ("I don't know half of you as well as I should like, and I like less
	than half of you half as well as you deserve.")