Desserts don't have network effects. The global hypertext network that we call the World Wide Web is a great achievement. Yes, commercialization has led to some awful excesses. But the Web still lets us all create the kinds of spaces we want, without needing to create separate networks that only a relatively few techies can access. That's why I think Gemini is misguided.
They absolutely do: I don’t eat a lot of deserts, and so I hang around other people who don’t eat a lot of deserts.
It isn’t a matter of I don’t like people who like cake, it’s just that I don’t want to be around the cake.
Html and HTTP are like that for some people.
There are even apps for iOS and Android already, largely due to how simple they are to implement (compared to a web browser).
In all seriousness Gemini (the protocol) is really no easier to implement than a subset HTTPS client as both are basically HTTP type commands over a TLS channel. Heck HTTP isn't even the hard part anyways, for everyone worked up about it I wonder how many wrote their own TLS implementation. Anayways don't conflate "every feature and function of a web browser" with "things an HTTPS client has to support" as even "Every HTTPS feature" is out of scope for most clients. When it comes to actually rendering Gemini (the document format) the difficulty doesn't change based on what protocol delivered the document.
Plus everyone already has tooling out their ass for HTTPS from viewers to libraries to debug tools to servers to command line clients to proxies to anything else you'd ever need. Plenty of these existing tools don't even care about the documents being transported, you're free to download a .md over HTTPS via wget hosted on a Caddy server even though nothing in that entire chain has a clue what .md is or should look like. These tools span from running on tiny microcontrollers to abstract high level user facing import functions in apps so it can clearly scale to any use case where you can render to a screen.
Wait until you read about HTTP upgrade mechanisms, HTTP transfer encodings or even 206 Partial Content implementations that are broken everywhere.
HTTP 0.9 was easy to implement, but everything starting from 1.1 and upwards is borderline insane, especially SPDY and QUIC.
While I don't agree with gemini's design decisions (and neither with gopher's), I can fully understand their point of view in regards to unnecessary complexity and side effects of network states.
Source: Building a peer to peer Web Browser, for around 2 years already (still far away from usable).
You want to TOFU certs? Go ahead, HTTPS isn't going to stop you. You want to use client side certs even though most websites don't? Go ahead, HTTPS supports you. You want to use a custom port? Go ahead, HTTPS supports you. You want to leave some features out? Go ahead, you don't have to implement every feature Chrome supports