Why not just set up a site that only allows markdown with plain pages and get all the benefits you list without a new protocol?
Setting it up on a separate protocol / markup allows you to make hard reasoning about what kind of privacy, features and protection you get as a user, rather than relying on the goodwill or current promises of your content provider.
It'd be better to declare a new doctype and use a reduced html. Just make it simple and make ads and JS bloat impossible.
Enforcing ssl is kind of silly since browsers are starting to do that anyway independent of this. It's orthogonal.
If you open the Gemini link posted below about why just defining a new doctype wouldn’t work, give it a read.
If you're building a protocol that enforces certain strict standards, like in this case being text only because the internet is 'bloated' according to the author, then the only point of having it is adoption beyond your community.
If all you want to do is communicate with ardent non-bloat advocates you can already do this on the regular internet, because everyone in that community does it voluntarily already
There's no point in codyfing standards for a community that follows your standards to begin with
This would seem to be a similar sort of issue to when people say "come chat on IRC", or use a mailing list to communicate about a project, or whatever else - you're not going to use those if all you ever want to use is a web browser. And that's ok in my book. I'll hang out with the people who do want to use those tools.
If Gemini catches on, someone will write an add-on for Firefox that reads it. And then it's just part of the Web that is fast and looks a little different.
And that link is a long-winded way of saying "It's good to put an artificial barrier in the way."
Just because you can do that, does not make it part of the Web -- it's still a different space. Those portals are basically web-based clients to the protocol, which means they're still bound by the rules of the protocol -- they're not going to have JS in them, for example.
So it's absolutely become adopted beyond its beginning community.
On the technical side of things, it looks like its an old battle replayed with older weapons, just to get go through the same path of HTML. "Oh, but we will not put more features". Ok, but people wont use it then because they can also serve text, markdown, etc... and can chill out, because they know if later they need to serve images, videos or graphics, they can do it with HTML.
And i say this as a person who is also trying to create some alternatives to the web. But instead of going back to the nineties, i tried to think how the technology of 10 years ahead would look like. I've probably not maded it because its really hard to push the envelop when things are almost in the state of the art as Web is. But i also don't think the answer for the future will be in the past.
You know what i think would be a really badass movement. To create a simple spec of the Web, even without Javascript. Because with "feature creep" Google through Chrome is making impossible for others players to create competing browser engines.
So if two folks decide that they will create a web engine in this new language they like, it wont be an impossible goal. Because there's this simple version of the spec, with much less features.
The people behind this might be very good at convincing people and real believers, this thing can float for some time working real hard for this.. But it will be really hard to get this out of a small niche.
Anyway i love the thinking behind this. The meditation, the koan, is really on the right track. We need more rebels and fighters on this front. But i just can see it, how this can compete as a subset of a massively popular and deployed protocol with clients everywhere? How can it really differentiate itself, apart from what the web today already can serve to people?
When you link to a Gemini URL, you're linking to something you know can't be replaced with something privacy-violating in the future. The worst that can happen is the server shuts down, which is a very different failure mode. And someone is less likely to do that than to switch to a different brand of HTML - or so's the hope.
It's not going to be a major thing that everyone uses. That's ok! Neither is IRC, mailing lists, and whatever else - but people still use them, every day. There's ideas exchanged, friendships made, relationships formed, and they serve a not-insignificant community's needs.
Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.
If you guys manage to have some 'killer apps' on this protocol, where people will try to reach it no matter how its is implemented, than there's a chance.
IRC killer app is IRC itself, and they manage to push themselves as alternative in the nineties where a lot of popular protocols and alternatives like the web were still in the beginning.
Anyway, if you convince people over time to serve their content through this medium, with enough and interesting content, the user will try/learn to reach them.
But i dont know, i think at least they should be trying to use some p2p DNS system, making it easy for people to serve their own content, or revisit BBS and serve contents in tree-like structures akin to directories..
I feel that there must be something to really differentiate it from everything else. Some things that are unique, and that the web + others are not covering. Because if you think about IRC or Email, they have distinct features that web could never cover even being a mammoth protocol, while this doesnt hold the same way when you think of Gemini proposal.
Anyway, people trying to do something, to change things for what they perceive as the better is a good thing, and it should always be celebrated, because even when the thing doesn't stick it might need adjustments, incremental evolution or just to serve as a influence to something else or through experience inspire the creators to create something even better.
Who, exactly, without a profit motive, wants the majority of users? I don't want to talk to most people, and I don't want most people to read what I have to say. I, like most people I think, want to spend most of my time in my community sharing things I find interesting with people in my community.
It's the same as tilde servers, or MUDs. They're not going to take over the world. They're small communities and most people will never even know they exist, and that's fine.
[1] gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/cornedbeef/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi
He goes on to say 'Supposing you had such a browser, what would you do with it? The overwhelming majority of websites would not render correctly on it.' - A very good point, but equally applicable to a Gemini browser.
IMO, they have confused the network protocol with the presentation. You don't need to drop HTTP in order to change the way websites look. Likewise, you don't have to implement HTTP features that you don't like (e.g. cookies). This just strikes me as another mistaken belief that rewriting code from scratch will solve all your problems.
I’m still not sold on it (you’re allowed to do websites without js/css!), but the effort and skill involved is commendable
When you visit a gemini URL, you know how it's going to serve you a limited capability, text based document, styled according to your own rules.