it is gemini:// actually

i feel like i’ve stumbled upon an alternative internet universe, gemini protocol, the small internet and a counter-cultural world!

@prologic@twtxt.net OH SHIT using this for a protocol like gopher is smart! might have to try that for gemini so i don’t have to keep a port open for that

Gemini 2.5 Flash
Comments ⌘ Read more

Generate videos in Gemini and Whisk with Veo 2
Comments ⌘ Read more

Google announces Sec-Gemini v1 a new experimental cybersecurity model
Comments ⌘ Read more

Gemini 2.5 gets 24.4% on MathArena USAMO beating previous top score of 4.7%
Comments ⌘ Read more

We hacked Google’s A.I Gemini and leaked its source code (at least some part)
Comments ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net thinked about Gemini protocol. Why corporations shit this name with cryptocurrency and LLMs?

@prologic@twtxt.net Gemini has an answer for you:

This is a conversation thread from a twtxt network, detailing a user’s (movq) frustration with the Mastodon “export data” feature and their consideration of self-hosting a fediverse alternative. Here’s a summary:

• movq’s initial issue:
  
  • movq is concerned about the volatility of their data on their current Mastodon instance due to a broken “export data” feature.
    
  • They contacted the admins, but the issue remains unresolved.
    
  • This led them to contemplate self-hosting.
    
• Alternative fediverse software suggestions:
  
  • kat suggests gotosocial as a lightweight alternative to Mastodon.
    
  • movq agrees, and also mentions snac as a potential option.
    
• movq’s change of heart:
  
  • movq ultimately decides that self-hosting any fediverse software, besides twtxt, is too much effort.
    
• Resolution and compromise:
  
  • The Mastodon admins attribute the export failure to the size of movq’s account.
    
  • movq decides to set their Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after approximately 180 days to manage data size.
    
  • Movq also mentions that they use auto-expiring links on twtxt to reduce data storage.

well, I assume by syntax you mean Gemtext (which I like a lot, my personal blog is built on top of it), so I think it might work for twtxt clients…

I knew of twtxt in Gemini Antenna, so at least the 2017 spec might work on that protocol. I think the main issue with extensions is that they weren’t designed with many URLs and protocols in mind.

Also I have to admit that the Gemini community significantly reduced in the last few years. I don’t know how worth it is to add support for Gemini now.

@eapl.me@eapl.me I agree. The syntax is weird inside Gemini and twtxt is made with the http protocol in mind and Gemini doesn’t work with some extensions.

Timeline and twtxt-php, don’t support Gemini, only HTTP/S, as a design choice (although originally it was intended to work on Gemtext, it was a niche inside a niche, so it was discarded very soon).

At the moment of building the engine there weren’t many Gemini URLs supporting twtxt 1.1 (with twtxt.dev extensions).
Also User-Agent won’t work there, and many Gemini URLs are a mirror of the HTTP one, so I think is not strictly necessary.

my 2c

Are there any clients to read gemini?

My twtxt feed is now also available at gemini://roccodrom.de/twtxt.txt

Google, DuckDuckGo massively expand “AI” search results
Clearly, online search isn’t bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They’ve announced they’re going to show even more “AI”-generated answers in Search results, to more people. Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with mor … ⌘ Read more

well, Gemini clients like Lagrange allow to show inline images when you click on an image link. Text based clients, like Amfora, usually allow to watch the image in another ‘window’.

For example here: gemini://text.eapl.mx/en-making-a-tic-tac-toe-variant and there https://text.eapl.mx/en-making-a-tic-tac-toe-variant

I agree that some topics require images to make it easier to explain.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Broke on me for having alt-urls I think 🥲

twtxt---profile-layout: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p, ("https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt" "gemini://box.aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt" "gopher://box.aelaraji.com/0/twtxt.txt")

(I keep thinking that going back go Gopher or Gemini might be a good idea at this point. They don’t care about that, probably. 🫣)

messing with gemini again, this time a static site generator called gssg - https://git.sr.ht/~gsthnz/gssg

my capsule is linked in my profile but just in case it’s over at gemini://lazuli.sayitditto.net

Portion of the modified Twitter TOS that goes into effect today (it’s on right now), as summarised (ironically) by Google’s Gemini:

“In simpler terms, this means that when you share your content (like text, images, or videos) on the service, you’re giving the company permission to use it in various ways. They can copy, modify, distribute, and even use it to train their AI models. This includes sharing your content with others and using it on other platforms. You won’t be paid for this, but using the service itself is considered enough compensation.”

Thank you, @eapl.me@eapl.me! No need to apologize in the introduction, all good. :-)

Section 3: I’m a bit on the fence regarding documenting the HTTP caching headers. It’s a very general HTTP thing, so there is nothing special about them for twtxt. No need for the Twtxt Specification to actually redo it. But on the other hand, a short hint could certainly help client developers and feed authors. Maybe it’s thanks to my distro’s Ngninx maintainer, but I did not configure anything for the Last-Modified and ETag headers to be included in the response, the web server just already did it automatically.

The more that I think about it while typing this reply, the more I think your recommendation suggestion is actually really great. It will definitely beneficial for client developers. In almost all client implementation cases I’d say one has to actually do something specifically in the code to send the If-Modified-Since and/or If-None-Match request headers. There is no magic that will do it automatically, as one has to combine data from the last response with the new request.

But I also came across feeds that serve zero response headers that make caching possible at all. So, an explicit recommendation enables feed authors to check their server setups. Yeah, let’s absolutely do this! :-)

Regarding section 4 about feed discovery: Yeah, non-HTTP transport protocols are an issue as they do not have User-Agent headers. How exactly do you envision the discovery_url to work, though? I wouldn’t limit the transports to HTTP(S) in the Twtxt Specification, though. It’s up to the client to decide which protocols it wants to support.

Since I currently rely on buckket’s twtxt client to fetch the feeds, I can only follow http(s):// (and file://) feeds. But in tt2 I will certainly add some gopher:// and gemini:// at some point in time.

Some time ago, @movq@www.uninformativ.de found out that some Gopher/Gemini users prefer to just get an e-mail from people following them: https://twtxt.net/twt/dikni6q So, it might not even be something to be solved as there is no problem in the first place.

Section 5 on protocol support: You’re right, announcing the different transports in the url metadata would certainly help. :-)

Section 7 on emojis: Your idea of TUI/CLI avatars is really intriguing I have to say. Maybe I will pick this up in tt2 some day. :-)

@sorenpeter@darch.dk on 4 for gemini if your TLS client certificate contains your nick@host could that work for discovery?

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

due to the gemini-centric nature of my setup, I don’t get webmentions. I just scrape the network and grep. maybe my aggregator will produce notifications at some point lol

@codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl I have some shell scripts that handle some of the log formatting details, but I mostly write my mesages by hand. Lately I’ve been browsing twtxt.net since they aggregate most of the known network. I have a couple of demo aggregators sitting around, but I’m in the middle of some infra rebuilds so a lot of my services are offline rn. They’re both built on a simple social graph analysis that extracts urls for your direct follows the follows listed on each of those feeds (friend-of-a-friend replication). certain formatting operations are awkward with my setup, so I may write an app of some kind in the future. likely gemini-based, but I have a number of projects ahead of that one in the queue.

Simplified twtxt - I want to suggest some dogmas or commandments for twtxt, from where we can work our way back to how to implement different feature like replies/treads:

1. It’s a text file, so you must be able to write it by hand (ie. no app logic) and read by eye. If you edit a post you change the content not the timestamp. Otherwise it will be considered a new post.

2. The order of lines in a twtxt.txt must not hold any significant. The file is a container and each line an atomic piece of information. You should be able to run sort on a twtxt.txt and it should still work.

3. Transport protocol should not matter, as long as the file served is the same. Http and https are preferred, so it is suggested that feed served via Gopher or Gemini also provide http(s).

4. Do we need more commandments?

Google tool makes AI-generated writing easily detectable
Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer ⌘ Read more

@asquare@asquare.srht.site Hi back at you!! 👋 and nice to meet you!

thank you gemini for continuing to inspire me to think smol

similar to data packets in NDN, each message has multiple names. a true name, which is an encoded cryptographic hash of the file itself. we call this kind of information self-certifying. given a true name, you can find a file and verify its integrity. additionally, agents can associate a self-certifying name with a pet name or subjective label of their choosing and share it with their friends/peers. zoko’s triangle can suck it. gemini://sunshinegardens.org/~xjix/wiki/cryptogen–specification/

once the minibase work is done and i have my testnet up, i can start to consider the question of brokerless pub/sub. i found state vector sync pub sub in the name-data research and i wonder what a toy version of that would look like. i started work on a demo of gemini pub/sub as a soft fork of molly-brown we we’ll see where that takes me!

minibase has a network security architecture with a number of overlapping layers of protection. first, routers and discovery endpoints either require a password or an authorized public key to accept traffic. this setup restricts who can reach the endpoints to an extent, but peering with enough third parties with less restrictive policies will practically allow global routing. since this is a possible policy choice, minibase also requires internal traffic to be authenticated. overlay traffic is automatically encrypted by yggdrasil, but applications should still treat the traffic like its clearnet and use tls. currently i’m requiring a dns acme challenge to generate wildcard certs, but eventually it might make sense to scope the certificates to the specific service its associated with. we don’t have much config generation in the nix modules yet, but something like this should be possible eventually. i’m working on configurations for ory oathkeeper, hydra, and kratos to provide a federated auth framework that your network services and minibase configs can integrate with.

i don’t normally reach for go when starting a project, but this pubsub gemini thing seems like a great addition to ~solderpunk/molly-brown and i was already intended on adding titan support so i might as well get familiar with the codebase.

gemini calls the request-response cycle a transaction in the spec. since trasactions are not cached, we have this problem where we can’t tell if anything was updated without fetching it and we can’t indicate how often a client should expect the content to be valid. the most common solution right now to just to keep requesting the resource until it changes or stops existing, which isn’t ideal. this sort of update notification model is interesting because it re-frames your thinking into something more like event sourcing. you end up needing to add an event queue and dispatch to the server, which is a bit more complex on the server side than plain static files, but the client stays the same. i’m curious to see what kind of systems could be built on this gemini message queue concept.

that’s a neat solution to the dead old feeds problem. pull-once-once-on-notify seems to fit the gemini tx model better than scraping pages on a cron timer. i don’t have a mechanism in my setup to produce that event yet other than the cron that rebuilds the capsule periodically, but that’s just a stand-in for not having any CI rn and especially not a CI that works with fossil.

There’s a lot more activity in Geminispace than I realized: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

Understand, ok seems i should leave gemini untouched

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt No.

iirc in twtxt v2 it starts prohibited

This is not true. There are no issues supporting fetching feeds via Gemini/Gopher. This is totally fine. What will likely happen is “recommendations” and “drawbacks of using Gemini/Gopher”

should i delete gemini support from twet? iirc in twtxt v2 it starts prohibited. And all of my fields are https

“Fu*** IRC maaan, all the cool kids are on Discord! IRC sucks”

LOL, Now substitute IRC and Discord with Gopher/Gemini and Web.
I hope you get the joke 😅

Found this: https://notabug.org/tinyrabbit/gemini-antenna. Maybe it have some user-agent alternative?

I hear about Gemini Antenna as User Agent alternative but cant find any information

Gemini/Gopher Twtxt feeds account for less than 1% in existence:

$ total=$(inspect-db yarns.db | jq -r '.Value.URL' | awk -F'//' '{if ($1 ~ /^https?/) print "http/https:"; else print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}'); inspect-db yarns.db | jq -r '.Value.URL' | awk -F'//' '{if ($1 ~ /^https?/) print "http/https:"; else print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | awk -v total="$total" '{printf "%d %s %.2f%%\n", $1, $2, ($1/total)*100}' | sort -r
7 gemini: 0.66%
4 gopher: 0.38%
1046 http/https: 98.96%

Oh, and I think I said this before, but just in case, fuck Gemini. Hell, fuck Gopher too. Bring on telnet, and UCCP. 😈

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Wait, what!? We’re dropping Gemini support!?

if twtxt 2 is dropping gemini support, i will probably move on and spend more time on my gemini social zine protocol instead. i think the direction of the protocol is probably fine, but for me web is a tier 2 publishing channel. if the choice is between gemini and http i’m always going to pick gemini. its been a fun ride, but i guess this is where i get off.

@quark@ferengi.one Mine is a little overkill 😂 but I need to do something for practice:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
trap 'echo "!! Something went wrong...!!"' ERR

#============= Variables ==========#

# Source files
LOCAL_DIR=$HOME/twtxt

TWTXT=$LOCAL_DIR/twtxt.txt
HTML=$LOCAL_DIR/log.html
TEMPLATE=$LOCAL_DIR/template.tmpl

# Destination
REMOTE_HOST=remotHostName     # Host already setup in ~/.ssh/config

WEB_DIR="path/to/html/content"
GOPHER_DIR="path/to/phlog/content"
GEMINI_DIR="path/to/gemini-capsule/content"

DIST_DIRS=("$WEB_DIR" "$GOPHER_DIR" "$GEMINI_DIR")


#============ Functions ===========#

# Building log.html:

build_page() {
	twtxt2html -T $TEMPLATE $TWTXT > $HTML
}

# Bulk Copy files to their destinations:

copy_files() {
	for DIR in "${DIST_DIRS[@]}"; do
    # Copy both `txt` and `html` files to the Web server and only `txt`
    # to gemini and gopher server content folders
		if [ "$DIR" == "$WEB_DIR" ]; then
			scp -C "$TWTXT" "$HTML" "$REMOTE_HOST:$DIR/"
		else
			scp -C "$TWTXT" "$REMOTE_HOST:$DIR/"
		fi
	done
}

#========== Call to functions ===========$

build_page && copy_files

so this path has been trod and its bad lmao https://web.archive.org/web/20230926192451/https://gemini.spam.works/~emery/sigil-report.gmi

So, today I created a space where you can send an email to the void: https://void.si3t.ch/ gemini://void.si3t.ch/ #smolnet