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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Probably. But you can see what would happen - without a new protocol or new document structure, traditional web browsers would work with the system. And because of that it wouldn't have an identity outside "the web, but worse".

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.)

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>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.

Well duh. If you have a race bike, of course you'll also keep a metro pass or a car. You still need to get places. But the race bike is your instrument of leisure and a place to unwind. This role cannot be fulfilled by a car or a metro pass for some people, because it just doesn't have the same relaxed atmosphere.

That’s an excellent analogy. I make my living building web stuff. When I get home, I want to play with other things as a hobby. I also have a ham radio license, but that doesn’t mean I only want to use that instead of the gigabit Internet drop at my house.

Yep absolutely. Another way to think about it is that using the web doesn't mean we delete all our local native apps. As users we don't gather into camps who only use one type of software or another. Modern computing environments are mixed spaces full of all sorts of different kinds of software. It very rarely makes sense to be exclusionary or exclusive about any particular type.

Gemini is no different. There's overlap with the web's use cases, but its its own thing. As a user, why not both?

>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.)

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491175

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