Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 23, 2023

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Misfin messaging protocol

      There's more details on the official capsule, but the short version is that it's essentially 'Gemini email'. If you've implemented a Gemini server then it should be pretty simple to refactor that to support a basic version of a Misfin server too. (I say a basic version, because implementing certificate verification is a bit trickier and I feel that the spec could do with some clarifications in that area).

      Misfin uses gemtext (text/gemini) as its message format, so once you have a functioning Misfin server, it's simple to set up a 'webmail'-style interface on your capsule for reading messages.

    • Hello, Smol World!

      I've made my foray into the smol net. Hooray! But who am I?

    • New Public Service: Publically Accessible GNUnet Hostlist

      Quick announcement. I'm running a publically accessible GNUnet hostlist at `http://clehaxze.tw:9876/` due to me failing to bootstrap 3 new nodes today. I was experimenting and this issue really annoyed me. I don't know what happened with the default one. `https://v15.gnunet.org/hostlist` is down. But `https://gnunet.io/hostlist` is running correctly. That should be enough for nodes to botostrap.

      Anyway, for GNUnet users seeing this post, you can point your hostlist daemon to use my server. **I understand this is unencrypted HTTP**. But a) that should't matter as bad actors will get stopped by GNUnet's crypto anyway and b) I'll fix it later.

    • Questions about verification

      I'm slightly confused by the verification flow on the receiving side for misfin(B). Apologies if some of these questions are already obvious in the spec/best practices/reference examples and I've just missed/misunderstood!

      I'm specifically trying to implement the case where the server's certificate is a self-signed CA and there may be multiple mailboxes (each with certs signed by that CA).

    • One Year of Writing

      It has been about one year and two months since I've written my first post, not only on here, but in general. It's definitely interesting to read my old posts, they give me a glimpse of how I thought in the past, and how much my opinions differ now, being more refined in some aspects.

      I've thought about deleting some of them. Perhaps editing. In the end, I left them up because I think it represents fairly well my evolution. I can certainly say I write better now than I did the year before. Writing is an unique medium to not only sharpen your opinions, but to have rather meaningful debates with others. It's a rare medium that is omitted nowadays for the audio-visual, but it's full of knowledge that we wouldn't otherwise get.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.