#smol.pub

TBH, I'd be perfectly happy to get an email from somebody in the following format:

Hi. I read your post at $POST_URL. I have a response at $RESPONSE_URL if you're interested. Thanks.

It would be an improvement over the "We'd like you to host native content for our client. What are your rates?" spam I've been getting lately.

Or, if they don't want to respond in public, they could just email me. It's the reason I still have a mailto: link in the footer of my website.

there doesn't seem to be a way to respond to somebody's gemlog, except in a gemini pub like this.

I'm not sure what became of it but a while back, ew0k had a nice idea: gemini://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/making-geminispace-social.gmi . Maybe it's a good starting point. I'm not sure how much has happened in the meantime, I've been away from the Gemini scene for a bit :-).

Otherwise, IMHO emails work nicely. They have all the advantages of private messages on a forum, with none of the disadvantages. ew0k's idea was super interesting in the wider context of a federation of gemlogs and capsules, but good ol' email is culture- and protocol-independent -- not as cool, but it gets the job done!

About responding to someone's gemlog, I've tried 3 things:

• Sending an email or private msg on Mastodon or Twiter
• If it's a long and kind of anonymous answer, I'll create a 'Re:' in my own smol.pub. With some luck a chain of linked posts create a conversation
• Or if it's more to having replies, writing here on midnight works well, I think.

You can check the source code here

I downloaded the code and checked how it worked. I was even thinking of replacing PostgreSQL with SQLite, to simplify that requirement (I think PostrgreSQL is overwhelming for a small site like that), but having the simple option of enjoying a version ready in a few clicks worked better for me at that time.

I wrote a little bit about why I won't self-host my smol.pub for now