Re: Re: Aggregators....back links
I don't know what a backlink service is
As you may have noticed, all of us replying to each other (you included) post a link to the previous post we are replying to. This is a backlink. Obviously we do this for those reading our posts to know what conversations are going on and what we are replying to. But another cool thing people have created on Gemini are services that compile lists of these conversation chains via these back links.
If you take a look at the Cosmos link above you'll potentially see the entire thread of this conversation and all the different posts people have made. All this happens because services like Cosmos go through and scan all the sites they know about, following all the links they have and create a massive map of the Gemini universe. They then provide a nice way to search for and find ongoing conversations.
I had assumed that Antenna filter links weren't shared publicly
The problem with some of these services is that they aren't "intelligent" in how they do things. tlgs's backlink service scans a ton of pages and will show you every single place your url is linked. This means conversations on other gemlogs, aggregators, bookmark services, bbs, etc. It's actually a great service but it also means that if a place like Antenna accidentally leaks filter urls, or people create automated services that just slurp up links and post them in aggregate you start to get a lot of noise. Take for instance a backlink to a post I made a few days ago:
As you can see there are a ton of leaked filters. It looks like the issue itself was resolved as later filters weren't showing up but it's a good example about how such a simple interface that Gemini allows for can be easily destroyed when noise is introduced. It is something we should be mindful of.
I'd say it's more relevant to people who use Gemini for "blogging", rather than for "digital gardening".
I agree. And I think we need more digital gardeners. Antenna is for gemlog updates and if you don't write them then a simple timeline/changelog style output could totally work here. "Hey yall, this is what I've added to my site in the last week..." Make a gemlog that just links to other stuff so people can subscribe and see what you are doing.
After my comment I've had an interesting number of people contact me outside of posting comments on their own gemlog. It definitely touched a nerve with some. What I was hoping for was people to start to acknowledge the reasons why we all hate the WWW part of the internet. A lot of people complained that "Gemini is dying" and "There isn't any good content on Gemini to keep people interested." The WWW side is so full of garbage and to pile it on, people go and aggregate the garbage making the pile even bigger.
My mastodon account is on a nice small instance of like minded people with many of the same hobbies and interests. A bunch of us all know each other from the BBS its run on. With the exodus from Twitter many months ago we started getting more people showing up. Always a good thing, we want more people creating content, having discussions, etc. But then we started seeing that the local feed was full of a few people posting every 30 seconds with this "Cross posting from my Instagram" that was just a retweat of someone else referencing some People Magazine garbage about fodder no one wants to see. The toot was so far removed from the original content and was all automated that a bunch of us had to spend a day blocking tons of accounts.
I was sort of hoping that the difficulty level of entry for Gemini would stop some of that kind of WWW crap from making its way into the smolweb. Or at least, if it must be here then have it show up in a way that doesn't drown out others.
$ tags: rant, smolweb, fediverse $
$ published: 2025-08-17 21:15 $
-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2025-08-17