Pingbacks / Response notifications

[makew0rld]

From gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/cornedbeef/replies-in-geminispace.gmi:

Something like Gemlikes could, of course, function for response notification as well. Instead of leaving an actual comment for the author, you just submit the URL to your response post at your own site. The backend software then fetches the provided URL (anything submitted which isn't a URL is summarily discarded), and if it's text/gemini content which contains a link back to the original post, then it is recognised as being a response (anything submitted which isn't text/gemini or which doesn't link back to some original content on the server running the backend is discarded) and the backend does something appropriate - informs the author via email, inserts a link at the bottom of the original content if it's being dynamically formatted, adds the response to an Atom feed, etc. Whatever people want to setup. Actually, I quite like this approach. Because the backend checks whatever URL it is given for a relevant link back, it is capable of figuring out all by itself which particular post is (or posts are!) being responded to, so unlike with comments there is no need for different per-post submission URLs. A single URL is sufficient for the entire site, so a link to it could easily be added to the bottom of every post by a very simple static templating system, or even by hand. We could standardise on what form that URL should take (making it a well-known endpoint, like robots.txt) to make up for the fact that text/gemini has no way to declare the URL like a HTML page would with a link (open question: how do we get this well-known URL idea working nicely with multi-user sites like pubnixes?). This would then enable automating the whole process in a sufficiently powerful bit of software, like the Live Journal client for Windows that Shufei mentioned.