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

[Jonathan McHugh]

Thanks for all your help!

====================
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels

October 21, 2021 1:39 AM, "Sean Conner" <sean@conman.org> wrote:

> 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.")