Bye, Gemini
makeworld.space
makeworld.space
If you look at an aggregator like [0] you see 10-15 new posts a day, which actually isn't a bad level of activity. But it's all just people's personal blogs. Which is fine and, again, is probably how it is intended to be. But unless you have a personal connection to these people or happen to be intensely interested in all the same things as them, it's difficult to stay interested in their personal blogs.
Things you don't really find in Geminispace (unless it is mirrored or proxied from the web):
- news or serious journalism
- any kind of social media
- any kind of interactive content
- any kind of multimedia content
Some of that is due to inherent and very intentional limitations of the protocol. Some of it is just due to the community being much smaller (ie, the web has plenty of interesting text-only content that could be on Gemini, but is not).
I still like Gemini and will continue to browse it, and it's important to point out again that it was never intended to replace the web. But I remember to check in on it less frequently now and it seems I am not alone.
0: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
Mostly blog posts about Gemini and Gemini software, in my experience...
Maybe it's time for Mercury, an even simpler protocol: you open a TCP connection, the server sends back a chunk of bytes consisting of ASCII 0x20 through 0x7e (and newlines). Clients must print the response to the screen verbatim. You "link" to other sites by including a hostname or IP address in the document; the user can then type or copy-paste that into the client's address field.
I wonder if the mostly proprietary OSes and browsers has anything to do with the early internet's appeal. Open source invites you to improve and customize the software. Does the ability to do so change the psychology and put the focus more on the app itself? Is it related to entropy, where software has lots of other possible ways that it could have been done differently, all of which sit in ones mind like alternate timelines distracting from the present?
With open software software(Aside from ultra minimal software defined by a specific ideal) you can always improve it with some effort, so perhaps it's always disappointing to some degree especially to anyone who knows how to code?
It's one of the only things people do where there are frequent updates. A textbook might go years between editions. Painters will usually return to similar themes and subjects when they feel they could do better rather than redo a painting verbatim. Software is never done, and software people are never done thinking about it.
How can we get the same results in FOSS that we had on the early internet, when people just said "it works, lets use it!" without using ultra minimal stuff that once again is only interesting to tech tinkerers, and doesn't really do much?
Also RFC 865 limits the QOTD response to 512 octets which isn't nearly enough.
It took me about a year of having a browser installed before I started using the Web.
But we had attempts at journalism and tons of interactive content on those sites.
When there was no social media, people learned HTML to communicate, and we got all the variety of the early web.
Now people make sites because they like coding, and use them to communicate about coding. Or they use social media and comment on random drama.
The internet eats it's own refuse like AI does. Without real life stuff to talk about it's pretty terrible. Video games were the main interesting internet native subject, aside from tech itself in the pure sense, but gaming culture has become almost a 4chan offshoot, less interesting to everyone else, while the games themselves are full of DLC.
Modern computers are fast enough for bloated sites. I don't think the issue is tech(unless you're really unhappy with the privacy situation). It's that all the content is made by people who spend all day on the internet, and it's all about tech.
And tech is just going in circles. With less real world connection, everyone just wants to be better at writing code, to try new languages, etc. It's philosophy as much as real tech, or maybe like some modern cyberpunk version of meditation, they're all just seeking simplicity, and it doesn't make much sense to people who didn't join the scene because they loved elegant ideas.
It's like reading 10 biographies and writing about them and your experience reading them, vs the old Internet where you went and did stuff and wrote about your life.
I wonder how many people can code but for whom coding is neither a major part of their work, nor a significant hobby?
My brother is training to be an oncologist. But he did a computer programming elective as an undergraduate and wrote some Python programs, and I believe got a decent grade too (need to maintain GPA). That was years ago, but if he felt the need or motivation he could dust it off. I’m sure he’s got the brains to learn more of it if he wanted to, but between a young family and a very demanding training program, I understand why in his limited recreation time he’d rather read a sci-fi novel than muck around with computers. But when his kids are older and he’s more established in his career, he’ll have more time-if he fees the itch.
I joked with him recently that there is nothing stopping someone with his career from doing a bit of mine as a hobby, but the reverse is not true: “hobby oncologist” sounds rather disturbing.
Assuming you mean WWW, this is patently false:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
And "news" services that utilise the internet are more often than not biased toward so-called "tech" news.
It's like the internet is constantly promoting itself.
Then one looks at the advertising. The businesses that advertise the most are the ones who are entirely internet-based.
I'm not suggesting this is a new trend. Definitely not. But I had hoped it would change.
Personal sites maybe but people wrote about stuff they liked. There were thousands of sites that just covered some niche topic or what today would be called a fandom. Sure there were sites that were just someone's journal about themselves but easily just as many semi-authoritative topic focused ones.
The Internet Archive has a number of scans of old "Internet Yellow Pages" books and Wayback archives of DMOZ and Yahoo!'s directory. Take a look some time, for any given subject there's tons of sites listed with tildes in the path.
The fact that grandparent looks at Gemini and sees "10-15 posts per day" rather than "x sites with y pages" is the problem. Today's culture sees anything written on the internet as disposable; at best it's a magazine article, more likely it's a leaflet.
> Without real life stuff to talk about it's pretty terrible. Video games were the main interesting internet native subject, aside from tech itself in the pure sense, but gaming culture has become almost a 4chan offshoot, less interesting to everyone else, while the games themselves are full of DLC.
I think this is the exception. Most gamers I know find some social connection in it, even if connecting with other gamers about the game they're playing. The programmers just tilt at ever simplifying windmills pursuing their platonic digital ideal.
Requiring some wanky app to even enter it doesn't help the issue
Ditto in the Spanish geminiverse: gemini://caracolito.mooo.com/deriva
On news, well, seriously, RSS' are not web pages and often work better than the pages themselves, and gemini://gemi.dev it's doing a great job. When a gemini service as Gemi shows up the actual content at 5% of the size of the actual web page, something it's really wrong with the web.
I think clans/cults/whatever are fine. Subcultures are ok. But you can’t pretend to create an “open” platform only to have the whole thing designed to be the opposite.
I feel the same about Mastodon. Cool tech, undeniably. An echo chamber, regretfully.
* Echo chamber islands with purity spirals that enforce the banning of Problematic instances
* “Free speech” instances where all the refugees from the above go, but which are just a different flavor of cesspool
Moderation is hard.
Not sure what you're referring to here, but to me the ideology behind Gemini is self-indulgent navel gazing. Sure it's neat, but that's it. It's literally just a subset of something, but no emergent property or benefit is borne from this shrinkage, so the end result is not very interesting.
That's fine honestly, I don't think the authors wanted to change the Internet with Gemini, I'm more surprised by the early adopters that are now suffering from post-hype depression, like the author.
Often this de-bloating is a benefit in itself, in a technical sense. But I suppose that's not what you were talking about?
So I googled, did some reading, read his blog some, and yes, he strikes me as one of those people who have entirely too many strongly held opinions, about a great many things that are probably not very important to peoples day to do lives - and will exclude people who do not agree with him in entirety.
I think a much bigger problem with Gemini is that, at least when I last looked through it, it was mostly people blogging about Gemini, or about the small web, or about software minimalism, or about community building, or some other meta topic. I'm sick of metatopics! Discussion online has got too meta. (The irony of this comment is not lost on me, I assure you.)
It's also a very narrow strand of people in the "community" of gemini.
Why not just use something like Obsidian for this purpose?
Correction: it is an overreaction to bloated modern websites. Interesting in various ways. Artificial constraints in an era of gratuitous excess can be useful to trigger creativity but my sense is that the territory Gemini revisited is simply too well trodden. Not a particularly fertile ground to seed an alternative universe. Heraclitus said, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on."
Added thought: The vision of a lean web is more than valid, but it needs to add something new and exciting even while it subtracts a lot of useless bloat.
You really need to easily "interact" with content by replying to posts, chatting, and up-voting, searching, and navigating.
Secondly, the restrictions seem great until you really could use a diagram or an actual equation or a million other things that aren't just plain markdown basically.
I am squarely in the wheelhouse of people who should be into gemini. I love the terminal. I have used vim for 25 years and emacs for a good 5 or so years before that, I have used textmode browsers and extensions like vimium etc to make my non-textmode browsers be more texty. My own website is almost entirely just plain text.
If it was obsidian-style markdown (ie including embedded images, latex and tables and especially diagramming using something like mermaid or excalidraw) it would be amazing[1] but as is, it's just not quite enough to actually be used for anything other than what's on there which is basically people just navelgazing or talking about gemini itself.
[1] And I expect that slightly less restrictive palette would make it attractive to a lot more folks to produce content for and therefore it would be a lot less like a barren technohipster wasteland as at present.
For me, Gemini's a sweet spot.
Yes, Gemini is slow. I like that. I don't need dopamine hits of constant content, even if I _have_ become accustomed to them (he said, on a website designed to have fresh links for fresh dopamine hits all the time). I like a slow "let me check and see what's come in across the past day or two or three", with the selection being pretty manageable -- a dozen or so posts.
I like the lack of tracking, the lack of JS, the lack of CSS. It means that we're focusing on the words on the screen, not the gizmos and flair around the edges. It's plaintext at its best, IMO. You write your stuff, I'll set my client to render it however I like to read it, everyone's happy.
Yes, everything so far is just personal blogs. I love that. It's more genuine, because it's just people talking about what matters to _them_ -- not what "their audience" wants, or what drives engagement -- and that's where the real good writing lives. I don't want someone to give me some AI-generated spew so that they can get pageviews for ads, or to give me soulless marketing copy so they can promote their brand so they can get pageviews for ads or merch-affiliate links. I just want to pop into a little corner and hear someone tell me something about a subject they care about, and have my own world enriched by it.
My only complaint about Gemini, so far, is that I do wish discussion was more feasible. I've seen some duct-taped-together comment systems, but it'd be nice if that were more of an easy-to-use and easy-to-set-up thing.
The impossibility of inline media makes a huge amount of otherwise interesting content (tutorials, travel blogs, museum sites, personal hobby sites) boring and tedious.
The impossibility of "easy-to-use and easy-to-setup" commenting system stems from the same "so simple as to be nearly unusable" ideology.
My understanding is that Gemini clients don't display inline media in order to defeat privacy-compromising techniques such as tracking pixels. A Gemini client could very reasonably decide to show images inline if they are larger than 16x16 for instance.
Yeah, same. I think it's just that so much of the Internet comes to you now (via social feeds, emails, or RSS feed), the idea of surfing to find stuff is mostly dead to us. And you have to fire up a different browser to do it? Just too easy to forget.
There will never be a killer app for Gemini, and pretty much anyone who's good enough to be worth following will never fully commit to the protocol.
I like that it exists, but that's about it.
I remember being a kid and having a blast on the 2000's internet, but it was really hard to bump into a really good site. Tbh most of them were kinda crappy.
Like with past friends and past games: I missed the good times, but if I tried to recreate today the same things like I did in the past, I realized that everything changed: Some friends stayed friends, but some others simply didn't. And some interests didn't interest me anymore.
I also realized that what I don't really miss the old internet. I miss being a kid, having all the time in the world in my hands, with total freedom to play with the most absurd activities with zero regards about productivity and being amazed with the most simple things.
> Like with past friends and past games: I missed the good times, but if I tried to recreate today the same things like I did in the past, I realized that everything changed: Some friends stayed friends, but some others simply didn't. And some interests didn't interest me anymore.
I think it runs both a bit deeper and broader than just "what I liked then, I don't like now".
In the 2000s and prior, the promise of everything involved seemed infinite. We looked at some small or bad website and saw the potential for it to become bigger and better. If it can do x, maybe it can do y, z, and more.
Today, we know what the full potential of a website is, and it's not nearly what we thought it was. So when we see a small or bad website now, we know that all it can do is maybe be a little better, but trying to improve it could just as likely make it unwieldy and worse.
In our disillusionment, we try to recapture that awe-inspiring feeling of infinite potential, but instead of making something new that's full of potential we only pantomime what we were doing 20-30 years ago, by forcing arbitrary virtual restraints on ourselves inspired by what were once the limits of our reality. Gemini, Hypercard, virtual game consoles, etc.
At best the result feels as artificial and empty as a more emotionally detached examination of the motivation might've suggested, and upon recognizing that we move on from it. At worst, we recognize how much of that potential wasn't ever realized — and the often arbitrary and cynical reasons why — and feel even sadder, because our memory of that infinite potential is tainted by the reality.
It's like the moonshots of the 60s and 70s leading to people thinking we'd be colonizing the solar system or breaking the speed of light by now.
Just like any limitation, all of these virtual-limitation experiments have some legitimate uses and can inspire creativity. But it's become clear that the people who dove into it for the doomed nostalgic hope of recapturing that feeling of potential have recognized that and moved on, either to newer pastures of actual limitation-breaking potential or other nostalgic boondoggles.
I mean, people attribute Arab Spring to Twitter (maybe it's even when traditional news outlets started paying attention to social media? I don't remember, exactly), so I'd say the potential of a website is pretty significant, although it really has nothing to do with it being a website. More about being a place for people to communicate.
I still have basically the same rose-colored glasses for the web. Sure, websites are not as exciting as they once seemed, but not much about the web's potential for people to connect has changed, aside from increased awareness by parties who would stand in the way, but in response ways of avoiding their attention have also arisen.
Good example is the game Minecraft - when it was new, everyone liked it for the sandbox nature and the endless possibilities. Now that most of the creative things in the game are either dead or stagnant, and the developers are actively working against the game's potential, now it feels like a dead end. It's similar to the web in this regard.
Nostalgia projects should just start from the old principles and build something which is an improvement over the things we had back then and which we have now.
> I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
> I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.
> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
I still feel weird about video. Gen Z just confuses me.
Gen Alpha will embrace telepresence. Then Gen Beta will reject the esthetics of disintermediation altogether and only relate face-to-face. Then Gen Gamma will create kinetic visual vocabularies, a synthesis of dance, sign language, and improv.
The pendulum will continue to swing.
Each cohort has their own thing. Different medias aren't better or worse. They're just different.
While it might not be a perfect analogy, many prefer using the terminal/shell/TUIs is because it is more powerful and efficient than the alternatives.
And even though I appreciate Gemini, I wouldn't say that it is more powerful and efficient. Granted, that's not its goal either.
Correct! Gemini is a mix between an art project and a political statement. It doesn't, and is not meant to, provide significant value over the web - a quick look at the specs makes this pretty clear.
If you view it through this lens instead, it's pretty neat, though.
I’d love to see a system that went hard on elegance. If we’re tilting at windmills, the alternative to web I’d like to see, is the fully Scheme web: S-exprs for content, DSSSL for styling, and Scheme for logic.
It was the web we’d have had in a different timeline.
Which beckons the question: does anyone know of or remember an automated system like this, where you rang a number and it would ring your fax machine back with a document? I like to imagine I could have made my millions on 'dial-a-newspaper' back in the 90s!
Isn't that mostly what we want from internet?
There were many, though they were not seemingly used for newspapers. Generally, you subscribed to a newsletter, or were subscribed against your will to a mostly-ads-but-pretending-to-be-a-newsletter. These would arrive on your fax machine, usually on a schedule. Or you dialed another fax machine that would respond with some infopage, specs sheet, or government document (and sometimes let you choose from a published menu by entering other codes after connecting).
I was only ever on the receiving end, so don't remember the names of any of these systems. I believe the dial-a-menu faxes mainly existed on high-end machines owned by large corporations.
Even for a minimal html, everyone uses a different "minimal" subset.
However, if you also had a like-minded community of similarly minimal websites, a mechanism to minify websites, search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites, and a social convention of avoiding linking to any website unless it was minimal (or minifiable) then you'd end up with something like the Gemini community.
In fact, I suspect something like that will supplant Gemini in practice. Browsers already have reader modes and some search engines allow you to block certain domains. I could easily imagine search engines or browsers providing greater end-user control over this sort of thing in the future.
I actually like that idea.
Having used a few, I agree there's room for improvement.
> the assumption that complexity of layout and density of information, much less relevance, are mutual opposites isn't valid
I agree, but has anyone claimed that there is a correlation between a page's complexity and the quality of its information?
My experience has been that the folks who willingly disable javascript, use niche minimalist search engines and browsers, or otherwise prioritize a minimal ("smol") web experience are acutely aware that they are making a tradeoff. They sacrifice access to a significant fraction of the overall web including many high quality pages in exchange for a user experience they prefer.
Like many who have tried it, I found the experience too limiting, but I appreciate what they're doing. If nothing else, their efforts are making the web better for people who rely on accessibility technology and are forced to make such tradeoffs.
https://search.marginalia.nu tries to be this, and is now being worked on full time by its creator.
How much sense does it make to switch to some immutable data structure or even a language with support for such rather than just not mutating the one you have? (Works for me.)
There is a philosophy behind Gemini which is to fundamentally simplify the web, not jut individual web pages that opt-in.
If Chrome supported Gemini tomorrow a significant portion of the user base would stop using it. Of course that's unlikely, Gemini's trust-on-first-use security model is something unlikely to be added net-new to a consumer focused browser.
It appears to have achieved this goal to perfection, since most posts in gemini are about ... gemini.
It throws the baby with the water, a bit.
Despite all that, it is still useful, but not enough to ignore all that it could have had but is missing.
In the early days I used to use Lynx, and it was actually really good. It was always quite fast, easy to navigate around with the keyboard, able to zip through things like navigation menus quickly.
Didn't work to well with image maps! (A thing back in the day), but it was a nice experience.
The lack of infinite content makes it peaceful and manageable. The lack of search (or maybe it exists and I just didn't care to find it) makes finding little haunts and communities more rewarding.
It's just some personal blogs about synthesizers or cereal recipes- but it's genuine and not people trying to build a brand. No one is trying to sell you anything. It's felt totally uncorrupted.
those who don't like html can easily host only text files if they want to. the main limitation here is the browser lacking a two pane directory/view mode
I think the ideal middle is using a stripped down HTTP subset, with HTML5 (maybe with some things removed, like script tags), and the latest CSS.
No JS. Focus on the document. Make any changes needed to improve things. No crossdomain cookies. Maybe no cookies at all. Only GET and POST maybe. Only allow some very specific headers maybe and strip anything else. Figure out a more novel system for secure transmission, maybe by default.
I'm thinking of starting something with Servo, I know it's not HTML5 yes but it could be a good way to limit things. Or maybe Libweb from the Ladybird project.
It doesn't provide anything that HTTP or Gopher can't. I don't see the point.
I might have written a client, and just forgot about it because a plain text internet is really not very interesting for any demographic.
What I mean is: what use do you have of TLS that is not about commercial applications and gatekeeping?
The obvious use of TLS is for e-commerce, so that you can pay securely. And for your passwords when you log into an account. But Gemini is not designed for e-commerce, it is designed for reading text documents. And it doesn't look like the philosophy is to restrict access to documents, so no need for accounts and passwords. What do you have to hide on Gemini?
Ok, imagine you have something to hide on Gemini. Here TLS offers only limited protection: it won't help you if the server is compromised, and it doesn't hide your connection to the server, only the data. For that, there are other privacy-oriented protocols that are much better suited for that.
So, TLS is a great protocol for the commercial web, and a rather weak one for privacy. Why do you think Google pushes so hard for https?
And for the anti-tampering part that is worthwhile, I think it would be better done at the document level, for example with PGP-style signature blocks.
Admittedly, I've never dived deeply into Geminispace, but it's never held my interest. Like the author of that post, I can get all of what I need online with my web browser and RSS feed reader.
But, hey, if you enjoy using Gemini (as a reader or a creator or both), then stick with it!
I think the ideal project starts closer to the 99% but allows for graceful degradation down to 1% with little beyond a TUI, some colors and hyperlinks. That requires creating the right infrastructure for servers to offer a "stack" of content built something like (text + (hyperlinks + (images + (css + (video + (animations + (...)))). Clients can then be developed to handle whatever portion of that stack they want to.
This at least has the advantage of lowering switching costs for users who want to explore this "new web" while also allowing nerds like me to experience the web "the right way" with no distractions
However, the elephant in the room is that is is hard to imagine content creators would be in any way incentivized to think about their content in terms of that stack. Reddit just wants to force everyone to use their app, text-and-hyperlinks be damned. There's a reason RSS feeds have died.
The problem is that it consist of below 1%. Markdown (let's say some fancy variants with tables) + hyperlinks + multimedia gives you a lot. Cut multimedia and now not even "look what I made" blog makes sense on it. Cut on basic formatting features. and you can't even make it nice to read
Gemini is _incredible_ for accessibility, because there's no disconnect between what's displayed and what a blind person can consume, and it's not complicated by layout things or developers who failed to account for the fact that maybe you need huge fonts.
Also, the moment you use normal HTML someone is going to stick an image in it. Now, i 100% support this idea. I've never embraced Gemini because the idea that the web is better with NO images is just absurd to me. I don't care how good of a writer, no textual description of something you've seen will come close to conveying what a photo can, and if you're trying to describe abstract art you're doomed to failure.
Which is probably a relatively small subset of images on the web.
It depends on how you use it. If you want to make ASCII tables, then a screen reader will not have an idea of how to navigate the table. However a simple HTML <table> is well understood by screen-readers. I would contend that properly structured HTML documents are far better for accessibility.
For example, the lack of simple text styling makes Gemini significantly less accessible than it could've been. Because now a screenreader will say something like "Significantly asterisk less asterisk accessible" instead of "Significantly emphasis less accessible".
I don't think images can have alt-text in Gemini so that blind users could get info from there.
Etc.
Edit: someone else has a much better answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052729
Gemini does not prevent anyone to put images. What it doesn't provide is the semantic separation between a link to an image and embedding that image into the page. The choice is up to the reader. Actually the default setting of the lagrange gemini browser is to download and show the images by default.
For strictly descriptive writing, maybe. But novels remain popular even in 2023 and while they mostly do not have illustrations of any kind, good ones paint some very vivid pictures.
Incorrect. It is actually bad for accessibility.
Because gemtext was so deliberately hobbled in functionality, it is actively hostile to users with accessibility needs.
No tables means people have to do things with ASCII art which makes them incomprehensible to screen readers.
Standalone images (i.e. not online with the content) means you cannot provide any textual clues or context to what the image is about - you just get the image on its own. And the pervasive use of ASCII art "images" obviously is terrible.
No way to specify descriptive labels for links.
No way to visually-hide content so that it is only visible to screen readers.
No way to use aria-style tags to semantically mark up the different sections of a page (this is the navigation are, this is the gemlog listing etc)
A bit web-centric but I think important considering the ASCII table issue, no way to use JavaScript to provide what is known as "managed focus" handlers to allow navigation of cells/content areas using cursors+space+enter etc.
I can't remember, but I don't know if it even has in-page anchors?
They should have made gemtext slightly more sophisticated - inline images, proper tables, and basic visual styling would solve a lot of the a11y issues.
It is a shame. I got into Gemini a bit a while ago (even wrote a basic library for deno @ https://github.com/matt1/deno-gemini (essentially a fork of my own https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher) and started work on a GUI client). I started to experiment with a totally-non-spec "style" spec that my client would support - essentially a line-by-line thing similar to CSS to apply the most basic of styles (colour, font weight, size etc) to gemtext lines, and which would be loaded from a well-known file (similar to robots.txt etc - compatible clients would load styles.gem or whatever).
But ultimately I was scared off by the short-comings of gemtext, and the staunch refusal to consider any changes or improvements. Which is fine, it is their spec and they don't have to change anything, but its why I left.
An all new protocol stack focused on accessibility could be pretty cool. Flip the problem. Instead of layering accessibility on top, make it the foundation.
We might learn that an accessibility-focus stack proves better for all use cases. Kinda like accessible consumer goods are also better for every one.
Something fun to think about.
The idea that accessibility means everyone's experience is nerfed into the ground just seems fundamentally wrong. We need to do much better than that and enable a richer experience that still is accessible. There's really no reason that can't be the case.
https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/
https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el
https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-write/tree/README.md
You can find these in MELPA too.
Here are a couple of other alternative ideas for the web:
https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet (an idea, not implemented)
I want to see it grow. But right now, it's inferior in my eyes to even the current Gopher hole hosters online today.
kennedy.gemi.dev and geminispace.info are both good search engines, though maybe not "really great".
I think the fundamental idea of a new protocol that's much more limited than the current HTTP + HTML + JS web platform still has merit, but Gemini is just too limited to get going. It's tough though to design something that's flexible and feature-full enough to be really useful and not too hard to implement, but not so much that it will inevitably be extended to be basically what the web is now.
Thinking about it a bit, I think the idea for required TLS and client certs as the only way to ID users is good, as is lack of support for arbitrary HTTP headers and JS. I think what really kills a lot of potential functionality is the total lack of support for sending any data back to the server by anything other than basically query params. I think it ought to be possible for somebody to build a Super-Gemini that just support some equivalent of POST and some simple equivalent of HTML forms in addition to what it had, and should still be pretty easy to implement.
https://transjovian.org/titan/page/The%20Titan%20Specificati...
It's "intended" to post a whole page/resource, but obviously it could be used to send an arbitrary blob just like an HTTP POST request.
So, nothing requires you to first jump onto an obscure protocol in order to present websites that support text mode web browsers and minimalist reading experiences. HTML is great for this. It has a decade long history and text browsers are actively supported.
Then there is the protocol simplicity argument. HTTP is not a very complex protocol with great overhead as-is.
Rendering pages is not a HTTP hurdle or even a HTML hurdle but a CSS and JavaScript hurdle. That’s where the complexity arises and you walling yourself off basic renderers begin. But doing so is a choice, not anything coming from HTTP or HTML.
In fact, the situation has gotten _better_ over time with HTML 5 with improved semantic elements and deprecating styling elements. This makes it easier than before to understand and present a website in various forms.
Or it should do so. Now there is the topic of obnoxious websites burdened with JavaScript and heavy, complex CSS but since this argument is about people willing to use Gemini, they are not the kind of demography that would design obnoxious websites, but clean and well-behaved ones according to the spec. So using HTTP and HTML is thus not a problem for Gemini minded people. Or it shouldn’t be.
I think Gemini is mostly a psychological phenomenon. People were willing to do something for themselves that captures their ideology and intentionally walls them off because they wanted to more clearly feel part of a subculture. This is harder to achieve if you just subscribe to a minimalist, well-behaved blog service like Bear or Blot.im.
The one thing I’d love to have today is native Markdown support in web browsers that could have a custom style sheet applied to them. You’d enforce simplicity in a similar way as Gopher or Gemini but in the normal web = way more convenient and lowering barriers.
Really, look that up.
The point is that browsers used to be able to browse the Internet, but major players such as Google have been working hard to limit all of these things to just HTTPS. Excusing things away by saying "well I don't use it, so it's useless" has only helped to narrow this path
We've moved beyond that now, why worry about a browser being able to read Gopherspace or Gemini pages? Putting those into dedicated browsers of their own has been the perceived action for some time.
People aren't doing that, I realize it, but maybe we should fix that instead of abandon the dream.
2023 me doesn’t want to install a client for WAIS or Gemini but I would do it if it made sense.
Think more of hypercard and go back and visit the computer Chronicles episodes on YouTube for a refresh if you want
The difference between the two is TBL's WWW was good for browsing citation based research data that's spread across a network of global institutions while hypercard was more about information organization and presentation.
The distinction is subtle in theory but in practice it manifests as inherently different patterns.
For instance, the fidelity of a WWW link is coarse. It could be richer, but it's not. I'm familiar with the W3C semantics group btw and I've read their literature.
The modern web is neither of these systems but it's also something I believe most people would agree is lacking.
Perpetuating the suboptimal anarchy of the present by reinforcing it isn't going to help. More agency needs to be exercised.
I don’t think there’s much to be had from a suboptimal experience.
If you want or need to use FTP you use FileZilla or Transmit.
Also, it's not like browsers are any less complicated now. They support things like 3D rendering and even MIDI device interfacing which are arguably more complicated for less benefit than supporting alternate protocols and technologies
The overlap is much smaller than gemini proponents would have you think.
E.g. I wouldn't touch gemini with a 15ft pole.
>Gemini gives you methods to display your media on nearly any size of screen.
But it still requires SSL and it still doesn't tell you the size of the resource you're fetching.
The Gemini protocol can't be fixed, as by design it cannot be modified.
Overall, Gemini just smells like an expression of the authors' narcissism.
On TLS, you can get an RPI far cheaper than a second hand 486 machine back in the day in 2001. Starting from a Pentium MMX (better a Pentium II) you can TLS just fine. Heck, even an Amiga with a 68030 can do TLS with a bit of ptience (few seconds on handshake/deal).
And any competent hoster would provide both services for its site, as lots of Gemini users do, not leaving anyone behind.
For instance, gopher://midnight.pub and gemini://midnight.pub
This argument itself is using flawed reasoning. Gemini was purposely designed as a subset of HTTP rather than a superset, starting with a tough approximation of HTTP 0.9.
Of course everything that is supported in Gemini can also be implemented in HTTP.
Basically - it's a decent way to "start over" and not be HTML-compatible, which is important if you are moving away from the owned-server model of hosting(which I am). It recognizes that it's not Markdown. The inline limitation is something I am probably going to breach at some point.
Gemini itself is something I admire, but like Gopher, it offers few frontiers for exploration.
It was probably even intentionally limited to be just protocol for making a blog without any user input. No possibility of making something useful on it. It needed just the forms support, but AFAIK the developers didn’t want that.
Basic HTML/CSS (without JS) would be minimal enough and even more accessible. See img’s alt attribute. You can view it on lynx or Netsurf, there’s no need to use huge clients for that. And even better, it was the way already.
I don’t get why would someone make a new protocol except for filtering people out. Why won’t they just focus on making minimal web services? As long as there will be something that’s not just software related, like it is often with Gopher/Gemini.
That actually appears to be one of the motivations. Which irks me out.
That could have been there intentions, I have idea, but if you think the web shouldn't have support for cookies or javascript, for example, then you really a new protocol. Even if you build a minimal web service, it still lives in a sandbox of third party cookiesand scripts, browser plugins, etc