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Comment by lyxsus | Hacker News Reader

Why?

Because the web has been taken over by commercial forces which seek to exploit your network bandwidth and computational resources without your permission to serve you ads, track your every move, steal and sell your information and mine crypto currency with the combined powers of dark patterns, supercookies, JavaScript, terms of service agreements and heart.

Sure, but what’s the end goal here? I just don’t get what prevents the history to repeat itself if it lifts off.

And considering current web, which of these problems are technically unsolvable at the moment? We can have privacy-aware browser if we’d want to. Protocols are mostly ok. HTML and css are actually good in 2020. Javascript can be disabled. Ads are filterable and there’s nothing preventing it from spreading by other other channels.

If that’s conceptually just a downgrade to bare minimum, how is it much better than lynx?

At this point an entire generation or two of people have reached adulthood since WorldWideWeb 1.0 and may have some childhood memories of the web around 1998 or 1999 or have heard tales of what the web was once like where people were naïve and put their entire life's story in pre-blog format and got to just figure shit out together in University dorm rooms, computer labs, early startups and IRC.

Some people just want to experience a little bit of what that was like, and Lynx isn't it. That's how I tend to look at projects like Gemini and Gopherspace necromancy. It's something a little bit different, a little bit cool, not subject to Eternal September, and just technical enough to scare all the suits away because the suits already have the web.

If any of these projects have any amount of commercial success, then yes, we likely would see something like what happened with the commercialization of the web happen all over again. In the mean time, it's a place to put stuff that a small niche of likeminded people might discover and read and maybe experience a little bit of that early magic of the early web themselves. You could just have a website and a blog, or you can have a gopherspace and a... uh, glog? Splog? I'll leave that one for someone else to figure out. But more importantly, you can do so without someone trying to run remote code in a client on your machine in a standard language that for some reason, every client in the world thought it was a good idea to incorporate an interpreter for.

> Some people just want to experience a little bit of what that was like, and Lynx isn't it.

I don't know, Lynx dates to 1992. Can't get much older than that with Web software. It has MS-DOS versions and was written by someone who became a founding engineer of Netscape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Lynx can be the same as it ever was, but the web that you can browse with Lynx is a different web than it was in 1992. Good to keep around though. :)

The point (at least for me) is that it will never lift off. Only a few people will ever use it. Good.

Also, as I think they point out in an FAQ, you know that when you go to a Gemini site it will behave in a certain way. When you go to an http site, you don’t know if it will be HTML 1.0 style or if it won’t even render without masses of js. There’s no boundary between simple sites and tracking-filled garbage. In Gemini you know you’re clicking an http link and you accept the risks before doing so; or you can stay in your safe Gemini zone instead.

> I just don’t get what prevents the history to repeat itself if it lifts off.

One of two things:

1. Nothing. They're trying to solve a social problem using technical methods.

2. The current UI ensures it never takes off. It remains a geek preserve, VC-oriented geeks need not apply.

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