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About Laika
Laika is two things, both accessed via a web-browser:
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A gopher and gemini browser paired with a portal that allows you to explore smol-internet spaces via a standard web browser.
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A specialized feed reader that optionally formats tiny-blogs like social media feeds, allows you to "subscribe" to them. The client then produces an aggregate feed view.
The whole thing is written in JS: React for the client, backed by a custom gateway written in Node running on a kubernetes cluster in an undisclosed location. This is a highly experimental project, it is unstable and could burn up on re-entry. I hope you enjoy it.
The Feed
Most of Laika will look and feel like a standard gemini browser. Note that there are no accounts, I've provided an import/export function under settings, but all state is stored in localstorage on your browser, so it's relatively fragile. Keep this in mind if you use it heavily, you should probably back up your bookmarks now and then.
The feed is something unique. If Laika detects what it believes to be a tinylog, it will show it like this:
You can turn this off temporarily by clicking the button at the top that toggles the view between the feed and normal gemini presentation. You can turn this off permanently by un-checking "detect tinylogs automatically" in laika://settings.
If you leave it on, you will notice a [+] icon. This will add the tinyblog in question to your feed.
Once you have a feed (subscribed to one or more tinylogs), click the "feed" button or visit the special url laika://feed and you will see something like this:
You can use the gear icon to configure/refresh the feed. Happy exploring!
Gotchas/Todos
State and Saving
There are no accounts. I've provided an import/export function under settings, but all state is stored in localstorage on your browser, so it's relatively fragile. Please use the export button to back up your state if you actually use this.
Editing
I built out an entire posting/editing function for myself, but since there are no accounts I haven't figured out how to make this usable for anyone else! Please let me know if you're interested and that will probably make me work more on it, otherwise here's a couple of screenshots of what it looks like on my end:
Why "Laika?"
Named after Laika, the little street dog who was abducted off the streets by the Soviet space program and launched into the history of human space exploration. An unwitting test subject, Laika died a terrible death alone and scared, killed by the people that made her famous. I think about her a lot, both the reality of that life and as a metaphor for how we traverse the current hellscape of exploitation-based internet.
I would like to honor her legacy. Not with a monument (she has a lot of those), but as gentle reminder of what we all have been, a request to keep exploring and playing as I often wish she could have.
I hope we all get to keep nosing around the back-alleys and weird side-streets of the information superhighway (ideally without dying in the vacuum of space for the dubious glory of a crypto-bro-military-industrial-ai-datacenter-driven cold war apocalypse.)