Why a whole new protocol? Why not start a collective of like-minded users who design plain HTML/CSS websites that work for users who have JS disabled by default? As far as I can tell that would be a strict improvement over Gemini.
Gemini's different protocol isn't important for technical reasons. Its important for social reasons - to make it effortful to move content to gemini, and effortful for users to start using it. The result is that all the content and users on gemini are people who have done work to opted in to it. And the space populated by small community like that will necessarily end up different from the culture on the web. (If they were happy with the web, they would have stayed there.)
But they have stayed there. Gemini users still use the modern web all the time, mostly to remind everyone that they exist and are rejecting the modern web so hard you guys.
Gemini is no different. There's overlap with the web's use cases, but its its own thing. As a user, why not both?
What does Gemini have to offer to web users that the web itself doesn't? It's entirely possible to write small, simple HTML documents without javascript on the web. Indeed, one could replace Gemini entirely with a Geocities-like service that enforced the same rules, including only allowing linking within the platform.
Alongside the web, Gemini is just a worse version of the web, it isn't different enough to be its own thing, nor does it offer anything unique. Gemini only makes sense as a means of forging a separate identity from and exclusionary of the web, as you yourself said in the original comment I replied to[0]: (If they were happy with the web, they would have stayed there.)
You could e.g. color the links to other participating sites to highlight them (and still have the option to link to a conventional bloated website).
The web is like a badly architected government such that most citizens are unaware of the badness. The collective you describe is like a group who use their own awareness of the badness to improve the country, but that does raise awareness of the government's badness whereas starting fresh by founding a new country does.
Actually, the analogy I just gave is a little too harsh on the web. A more charitable description is that a subset of the web's users is poorly served by the architecture of the web, but most of that subset is unaware of that fact (what with not being experts on the effects of subtle technical decisions on something as vast, open and complex as the internet).
I am not defending Gemini in particular; I use it but have yet to form an opinion of it; I am defending the strategy of founding a new internet service to compete (for the time and attention of users) with the web.
I don't buy this argument.
Even if "he/she ascribes the good experience (...) to the web":
(a) the subset of users that could fell into one of the "participating sites" would be much larger than the subset of users that would install something like Gemini. The subset is open with no barrier at all to every web user. They just need to visit a page. The second subset requires them to have heard about Gemini, to care enough about it, and to actively download a client.
(b) For this reason, even the subset of (a) that could tell "Ahh, this site is fast and nice because it's simple web code" would be much larger than the subset that would install something like Gemini.
(c) If the subset that recognizes the benefits from the simple web design designs to join the movement, they just need to code simple html and deliver to everybody (an easy sell, no new tools needed). For the subset that discovered and likes Gemini, they'd need to find a host and install a Gemini server (much fewer options, no turnkey-host that supports it, unknown code quantity/quality), and then their potential audience is severely limited to Gemini client users (a much harder sell).
(The main problem with using the web to publish plain-text writings is that unless the person doing the publishing is an expert on the technology, in which case he will use something like Github Pages, there is no cheap way to publish a few paragraphs or a few dozens of paragraphs where it fill find a decently-sized audience without enriching some intermediary and subjecting most of the people who over the years will read the writings to either advertising or paywalls.)
I offer no criticism of the web as a way to buy things online or to apply for a passport online or such.
I am avoiding saying that the web is bad: the web might be bad only for a small fraction of web users. I don't know enough about how web users differ from each other to say how large the fraction is. I do know enough about software and how site owners will respond to incentives to be able to tell that the web is bad for users sufficiently like me. Well, I'm fairly certain, too, that the web is severely sub-optimal for blind users (and I wonder if attempts have been made yet to tell blind users about Gemini and to make it easy for blind users to get started with Gemini).
Someone could write a whole book about how seemingly insignificant decisions in the design of something like a web browser (e.g., decisions in the design of web standards) can have profound effects, but I think in this case it is better to show than to tell.
Improving Gemini might eventually show a lot of people that the web is a sub-optimal solution for some of their needs. Note that Gemini need not completely replace the web in a user's life: one session with the improved Gemini might get the point across to a new user (and the user might do nothing but browse Wikipedia during that session).
In contrast, the strategy I originally replied to, namely, a collective of web sites, might significantly improve the experience of many web users, but will cause approximately zero web-tech non-experts to become dissatisfied with the web.
I have no road map for how a large numbers of people dissatisfied with how the web serves some of their needs will eventually find their way to something better. I figure it will take many years. I do believe that increasing the numbers of dissatisfied users is probably a necessary first step.
=> https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
> 2.5 Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?
> Many people are confused as to why it's worth creating a new protocol to address perceived problems with optional, non-essential features of the web. Just because websites can track users and run CPU-hogging Javsacript and pull in useless multi-megabyte header images or even larger autoplaying videos, doesn't mean they have to. Why not just build non-evil websites using the existing technology?
> Of course, this is possible. "The Gemini experience" is roughly equivalent to HTTP where the only request header is "Host" and the only response header is "Content-type" and HTML where the only tags are <p>, <pre>, <a>, <h1> through <h3>, <ul> and <li> and <blockquote> - and the https://gemini.circumlunar.space website offers pretty much this experience. We know it can be done.
> The problem is that deciding upon a strictly limited subset of HTTP and HTML, slapping a label on it and calling it a day would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume only that kind of content in only that kind of way. It's impossible to know in advance whether what's on the other side of a https:// URL will be within the subset or outside it. It's very tedious to verify that a website claiming to use only the subset actually does, as many of the features we want to avoid are invisible (but not harmless!) to the user. It's difficult or even impossible to deactivate support for all the unwanted features in mainstream browsers, so if somebody breaks the rules you'll pay the consequences. Writing a dumbed down web browser which gracefully ignores all the unwanted features is much harder than writing a Gemini client from scratch. Even if you did it, you'd have a very difficult time discovering the minuscule fraction of websites it could render.
> Alternative, simple-by-design protocols like Gopher and Gemini create alternative, simple-by-design spaces with obvious boundaries and hard restrictions. You know for sure when you enter Geminispace, and you can know for sure and in advance when following a certain link will cause you leave it. While you're there, you know for sure and in advance that everybody else there is playing by the same rules. You can relax and get on with your browsing, and follow links to sites you've never heard of before, which just popped up yesterday, and be confident that they won't try to track you or serve you garbage because they can't. You can do all this with a client you wrote yourself, so you know you can trust it. It's a very different, much more liberating and much more empowering experience than trying to carve out a tiny, invisible sub-sub-sub-sub-space of the web.