Hacker News Reader

On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

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.

Who is everyone? There are proportionally very few coders in the world and even fewer making their own sites compared to non coders.

> There are proportionally very few coders in the world

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.

This is why I switched from programming professionally to doing something else. Pretty much every field of knowledge (that existed before 1950, at least) is interesting once you get into it. Most of them you cannot do for fun. I can program for fun. I can do something else for work. Doing programming as a job ruins my favourite hobby.

I think the point was that the people producing content for their own personal website are a small, self-selecting group, with social media catching most of the rest of the online populace.

> On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

Assuming you mean WWW, this is patently false:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

"It's that all the content is made by people who spend all day on the internet, and it's all about tech."

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.

Just noting the meta of this commentary being a common reoccurency on this very tech-news commentary forum ;)

> On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

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.

Most early sites were personal but they weren't blogs. Many of them were even technical, but people made an effort to write for posterity rather than just for today. People wrote a site like they were writing a reference book, even if most of them got bored halfway through.

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.

You've really succinctly captured why I don't enjoy a lot of modern tech content online these days. It's too self-referential, too steeped in itself. The people involved are motivated by a reaction to other online content and want to produce new online content. Then there's the online beefs.

> 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.

> the content you find on there is pretty much exactly what you would expect

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.

Make the protocol so boring you have to write about something other than the software? It might work!

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?

neocities.org is way more interesting if you want to see people just building sites for stuff they're interested in

I recommend port 17.

Hush, this is a new movement, a rejection of old bloated protocols like Gemini and HTTP!

Also RFC 865 limits the QOTD response to 512 octets which isn't nearly enough.

This makes me think of a gag from the Simpsons, where the only dialogue coming from a ham radio was "I have a ham radio"

When the Web first came online in the early 90s the only web sites I remember were "How to write HTML."

It took me about a year of having a browser installed before I started using the Web.

Finger already exists.

And it’s been used for blogging too! How history repeats itself… I remember John Carmack’s finger blog.

Those are the things I am least interested in geminispace lacking. As you get older you realise that the "news" is mostly not news, especially these days. Social media, interactive media, multimedia content.. Not really the point of geminispace at all. Gemini is meant to emulate the old internet, when it took a minute to download a each photo someone posted of their trip overseas.

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.

No wonder really. Markdown + images fits many use-cases, worse-than-markdown without any multimedia just don't. It doesn't even work for blogs, if you want to brag about what you did, no pics, if you want to have any viewer interaction whatsoever, no dice.

Requiring some wanky app to even enter it doesn't help the issue

I looked into Gemini. I love some of the core tenets of the philosophy (Drew Devault), but it quickly dawned on me after reading some of the stuff on there: I won’t name the ideology but it almost feels like Gemini was developed to propel it. There is not much diversity of ideas.

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.

I feel the same way about Mastodon. The founding generation of that ecosystem has very strident views about certain matters that are foreign (and in the sense of "never even think about it", let alone "I disagree") to probably over 90% of the world population. Expectations are that the bulk of entrenched Mastodon instances are going to ban federations with instances that permit discussion beyond what that founding cohort is comfortable with, so here, too, the technology almost exists to propel ideals, too.

My experience with Mastodon was that you can choose between:

* 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.

Yeah likewise. One of the reasons (well I'm an old-time SSB fan) I'm interested in Bluesky is that defederation isn't really a thing and so the failure modes of splintering communities isn't as big of a deal. When individuals have more power and mods have less, the impact of politics on the community would probably be more diffuse. Or that's the hope anyway. The mods = gods era of the internet was always a colorful one.

> I won’t name the ideology

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.

> 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.

Often this de-bloating is a benefit in itself, in a technical sense. But I suppose that's not what you were talking about?

I had no idea who Mr. Devault was before this article.

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.

False, there are lots of gemini places, look at them at gemini://medusae.space, and most of them are not Gemini related.

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.

Possibly dumb question, but why does gemini have to be difficult to use? Why not just serve simple renders of Markdown+inline media?

Why not just use something like Obsidian for this purpose?