Re: Link Rot

november 28, 2021

I find it very unfortunate how horrible link rot is in Gemini (even worse the Web a lot of the time), and I think it's probably because most Gemini servers are very experimental, and people will set them up and maintain them for a few months and then give up and eventually they'll shut down. Also while the idioms for how a capsule should be organized and how navigation should work are still being figured out people seem to reorganize their capsules constantly; I certainly know there is a few things I've been wanting to rearrange on my capsule but haven't in order to preserve links and such—I'm probably going to get around to setting up redirects one of these days.

At any rate, Gemini has major problems with link rot. I've set up a little script to save Gemini pages to Wallabag via a Gemini web proxy:

gemibag

Unfortunately then I have to go read the articles through the Web, or redownload them as some HTML-based format like epub or something, no getting back the native gemtext :(

I've been meaning to write a Pinboard–Wallabag hybrid CGI app for Gemini but knowing how these things go it probably won't come about for a long time. It seems like it would be more and more useful by the day though and archiving Gemini pages is relatively easy, so I may move it up my pending projects list… I just gotta decide a language to write it in because I can't stomach writing in Go anymore with what the big G is doing to the ecosystem.