HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself.
I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed
I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed
Like this page https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/ is rendered from this code:
# Gemlog
=> /topic/ Browse by topic
=> /links/aggregators.gmi Aggregators
=> /log/feed.xml Atom Feed
This section of the memex contains what might described as a weblog.
%%% FEED
%%% LISTING
Gemtext is very close to what I want. The only thing I wish is that it had some rudimentary support for illustrative images. Not like inlined in the text, but at least centered figures. That would go a long way.
Edit: The creation of new protocols and technical solutions alone increases cognitive complexity. From this point of view, it is even counterproductive if existing solutions can enable the same.
Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.
Gemini cannot do a lot (which is by design), but it also has huge capabilities. For instance, while client-side logic is impossible, there's nothing preventing you from writing a "web app" that does its logic on the server side. Yes, you would require page refreshes to update what the client sees, but with Gemini each page load is much, much cheaper than HTML because the response payload is smaller to transfer and easier to parse.
Assuming that your Gemini client allows enabling inline images, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a stateful web-app that is a clone of Twitter, Facebook or another social media site. There's no reason why you couldn't design a simple webmail client a la Gmail, or a system monitoring dashboard, or a bug tracker, or basically anything else that doesn't have to rely on complex layouts or inline video to do its job.
Some people had an idea, went out, and made it a reality, built a small community around it and now we have Gemini.
We should encourage such things. Projects don’t need to change the world and they don’t need to be useful to all people or exploitable by corporations. Building something because it’s fun, or because you want it to exist is good enough.
Toys are way better than startups and growth and monetization and disruption and onlyfans to pay the bills.
This "killed" Gemini from the start
Gemini is fully encrypted
It simply doesn't rely on the same chain the CIA and other agencies own
inline images are left to the client implementation.
Lagrange supports them, for example.
And that is by design. Gemini is designed to exclude those features, because the target audience of this protocol wants to browse a web where those features are impossible to include.