Comment by 🕹️ skyjake

I've now made a quick change in Bubble so that if @admin locks a thread, it will say "Locked by Admin". Non-admins naturally can't unlock the thread after that. This should be enough granularity for now.

Dec 02 · 13 days ago

9 Later Comments ↓

@jprjr, appreciate your input.

In this case I did insert my opinion, no doubt, and that would've been it, but OP actually requested that I explain a few times -- which I was kind of concerned with as it seemed possibly cynical.

But I was careful to congratulate OP on what I thought was a good technical solution and explicitly stated that I am not here to tell anyone how or what to do! Also, that my opinion was in good faith and not there to offend.

I don't think anyone deserves to have pages of expletives and bullying directed at them for suggesting that forced real-time streaming benefits corporations and offers little to the end user.

I'm not sure if anybody else brought it up but - I've run a few Icecast internet radio streams.

People enjoy the experience of listening to music where they're not strictly (or maybe not at all) in control, and are hearing the same music as other people at (roughly) the same time.

It can become a fun, collaborative experience. My own were usually paired with IRC, so listeners could use a chatbot to request songs. Like "oh this song you just requested is great have you heard this similar one?" - it's a sort-of realtime, ephemeral playlist.

In theory you could build out similar systems that download the media and play it in sync with other listeners. But that's a lot of overhead

to solve a problem that's essentially already solved.

It's not all corporations trying to get ads in front of your eyeballs or into your ears.

@jprjr, that is a good point. I miss the shared experience of radio and TV of the past, and remember everyone waiting to find out 'who killed JR' as a kid...

I have nothing against that. It is one of the rare uses of real-time streaming that makes sense, akin to the 'call-in talk radio' format I mentioned.

I haven't participated in such a broadcast, and kind of wish I did. Haven't seen that on Gemini.

In the early days of the internet there was much activity in the 'multicast' space, which was supposed to offload the server to geographically-spread re-broadcasting routers... Don't know if icecast is a child of that.

Icecast isn't a descendant of multicast but it does have some geo-balancing capabilities. It supports the concept of relaying, so you could have distributed relays then route people to a particular one via DNS or http redirects.

@bluesman I confess to being one of the voices that pushed back on the Gemini scripting thought experiment, and I'm very sorry if anything I've said has ever come off as an attack or caused offense. I have my opinions on what best fits Gemini's ethos, as does almost everyone, but it's not my place to tell anyone what they can or can't do within the confines of the protocol spec. If I don't agree with it, the only thing I can do, and the only thing I'd be justified in trying to do, is not implement it myself.

It's strange to me that you would get pushback for developing a small Web client of your own, of all things. I haven't used Alhena myself, but any project in the Gemini sphere is a good project to me, because that's how a community grows and finds the paradigms that work best. Plus, freedom requires choice, and the more choices available to browse Gemini, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Keep at it and forget the naysayers.

@stack, if you would genuinely like to participate in something like that please stop by hashnix. The radio station there is Gemini-enabled (I use my pxc client and pipe the cgi page to mplayer), and when people do shows we hang out in the hashnix dream chat and enjoy together. This morning our DJ pa2 did his Astral Peaks show with several people around.

@ingrix, thank you, I will do that! Currently traveling but will have free time in a couple of weeks.

At least one good thing came out of this.

@jsreed5 Thanks. The scripting "thought experiment" remains just that. I never intended to implement it and never expected the gemlog to get the attention it received (I posted that gemlog before I even knew how to submit content to Antenna).

I did make Scriptonite which runs sandboxed JS on my server using Gemini template pages. I think it's cool - especially how easy it is to prompt for user input (which has nothing to do with scripting). That project got a lot of pushback including claims that it violated the Gemini spec. Odd considering it works in every client that correctly supports URL encoding rules.

Anyway, to each his own. My comments about pushback were in response to another post speculating about my motivations and not an attempt to gain sympathy. My tech friends seem bewildered by the amount of work I've done here and sometimes I'm bewildered myself. Maybe I'm just a stubborn guy who also happens to be a glutton for punishment.

While I have you here - one of your CGI programs "My Age In Miles" inspired me to write a Scriptonite version a few weeks back. I give credit and a link back to your page.

I am not sure why anyone would object to that.

Original Post

On Grandstanding on BBS — [gemini link] Re: On Labels [gemini link] the discussion that caused all this Weighing in the risk of escalating the drama vs. having a safe, hate-free place for discussions, I cannot remain silent in light of recent abuse of BBS and myself. BBS is a place I've enjoyed since its birth, to exchange opinions with other Geminauts. It's value is very much in the ease of starting and continuing discussions with others. Sometimes we agree, other times we don't. Occasionally...