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by trap_chateau 1968 days ago
While I think gemini is a cool 'hideout' on the web, it seems a lot of content served over gemini is also served over http. Does anyone know of any message boards like The Midnight Pub[1] that are served over gemini only? After some browsing, I couldn't find any.

[1] https://midnight.pub/

gemini://midnight.pub/

2 comments

I'm hosting a very simple one at gemini://gemini-textboard.fgaz.me but it's mostly just a demo for my gemini Haskell libraries: https://sr.ht/~fgaz/haskell-gemini/

Another one I know of is gemini://geddit.glv.one/

That's kind of the trouble with Gemini now. Since you can't send significant amounts of text to the server, you can't really make a message board kind of thing in pure Gemini. The content submission has to be done via HTTP or a terminal interface to the server.

But then, if HTTP is the simplest and most secure way to allow posters to make submissions, then is there really a point to allowing the messages to be read over Gemini? Might as well make a simple HTTP layout and have the whole thing run over HTTP.

>That's kind of the trouble with Gemini now. Since you can't send significant amounts of text to the server, you can't really make a message board kind of thing in pure Gemini.

Given the aggressive anti-complexity stance of Gemini, isn't that supposed to be a feature? A messageboard isn't a static text document, it doesn't belong there.

It's on the protocol designers and promoters to determine what it ends up being of course. It seems like a bit of a mismatch to me right now. The client cert support as the exclusive way to identify users is a really cool feature of the protocol IMO, but it doesn't seem like it's very useful without dynamically rendered pages. It's certainly possible to do dynamically rendered pages now, but they're also of much more limited use without the ability to send complex data to the server using the same protocol.