Welcome and Unwelcome Content on Antenna

I knew this would happen, and I was not looking forward to it.

I’ve deleted a feed from Antenna today, because it doesn’t fit the purpose of Antenna: helping to discover Gemini content. The deleted feed’s content was daily posts with links to WWW content.

Deleting content will always offend people, regardles of the reasons why anything was deleted. To clarify which kind of content is a good fit, I’ve added the following to the beginning of Antenna’s about page:

Welcome and Unwelcome Content

Antenna’s purpose is to help people discover Gemini content, which is mostly created by individuals. Any content or content sources not fitting this description are excluded and should be submitted somewhere else. This also excludes capsules, whose posts’ main content is links to WWW content, making them aggregators in their own right.

Other known Gemini aggregators are blocked by default, because the nature of aggregation is to display different posts from different authors. Gemsubs having posts from different authors cannot be displayed properly by an aggregator aggregating from other aggregators, because the originating aggregator becomes the source for all posts, effectively attributing all posts to itself. Multi-author Atom feeds are also not supported for the same reason, and because only the author of a feed should decide what ends up on Antenna.

What’s welcome, however, is people writing about their aggregators, or people writing about things happening on the WWW. It just has to be served with the Gemini protocol and return reasonable Gemtext. Haphazardly converted web content to just increase the total addressable audience of a WWW blog or publication is not a good fit. However, purposefully converted WWW content, which embraces Gemtext limitations, created by a person who actually reads Gemini content, is a good fit.

In general, no feed should dominate Antenna, which on most days only has a single-digit number of posts. It’s for people writing actual content, not for pumping out links.