Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.
Yep there would always be the temptation to say "well I need just one cookie" or "well I need just this bit of javascript" Gemini doesn't give you those options.
It’s also make the protocol considerably easier. I read it in two small settings. It’s surprisingly digest and make you want to start implementing a server or a client for it.
I think it's only a matter of time before Gemini does that. The moment it's actually used by people who aren't interested in the underlying tech, someone will fork the browser and include either video support or scripting of some kind. Or they'll say, maybe it should display PDFs too - and that will bring the JS engine in as well.
It's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image.
If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors.
What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that?
I think if you want to further limit yourself than Gemini yet maintain some of the semblance of the existing modern web, you can go the Beaker Browser [1] route.
I think this is an interesting argument, but my question is why can't it just work in the browser I have with an extension? No matter what people say, modern websites with JS and HTML and such aren't going away. I can't just stick my head in the sand and only use this special browser since I use too many things that make my life better in meaningful ways that use the traditional protocols. Many of them wouldn't be possible using Gemini (I assume, I haven't dug in much).
That means if I want to use Gemini I would have to add a whole other browser to my computer and switch between the two while browsing which is super annoying. At that point I just won't bother.
What is the end game here? Do they want all websites to switch to Gemini? Do they expect people to use two browsers? Are they saying that anything that can't be built on Gemini should be a Native App?
I use Firefox. When I click on a gemini:// link it opens it in Lagrange. Seems pretty seamless.
If you're not going to install Lagrange, I'm doubtful that you're going to install an extension either. This isn't about you personally, it's a statistical judgment about the market segment you're signalling yourself to belong to. People reluctant to install native software are also unlikely to install extensions.
Having a separate app provides some additional protection compared to an extension that can look over your shoulder at everything you browse. Lagrange runs in a separate process entirely, and it can only snoop on the Gemini websites I visit.
Me, I go to Gemini (and Mastodon, and the tildeverse, and plan.cat, and twtxt, and, and..) precisely because it has no hope in hell of adoption. If someone's posting there they're intrinsically motivated[1]. That's the stuff I want to look at. When I'm in small pools like these I'm less legible[2] to marketers.
You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based.
Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.
the second definition you didn't list is "the attitude or behavior of a person or group who regard themselves as belonging to an elite", which is the meaning used in this case. I don't agree that's elitism either, just wanted to point this out
Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it.
IOW a web that's safe and user-controlled, again. Just a damn hypertext document browser that doesn't also bundle a spying suite and hand control of it to anyone by default. We should have realized when people started putting up troll pages that broke your computer simply by using JavaScript's normal capabilities, that we needed to seriously rethink including a scripting language with all kinds of ability to act against the user just because they followed a link, as part of the Web. We didn't do that, though, and instead we got gestures at everything.
I'm not sure Gemini's the right solution, but that would be a nice thing to have, which we do not have now.
> Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it.
It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it. You don't have to throw the baby (gemtext missing inline links!) out with the bathwater.
You can do that without making intentions verboten altogether. I'm happy to see someone's weirdly styled homepage or tumblr blog, and Gemini strips too much away for it to be worth it.
I think abut it kind of like this (as someone who has never used Gemini):
There are all sorts of uses for cryptographic proofs; e.g. you can sign a document and prove that you were the one who signed it, or you can do a bunch of double-SHA hashes and prove ownership of a Bitcoin, you can prove via a SSL certificate that the content that claims to come from somedomain.example actually does, etc etc.
But there's no way, via currently existing protocols, to deliver a document with a proof that the document does not contain code designed to track the user or that the document will display properly without running arbitrary scripts.
Gemini is bikeshedding, yes. But it solves this social problem - a problem of expectations. You can't make a webpage with tracking scripts and deliver it over Gemeni because there's no point. No one who received the document would actually execute any of the scripts. So Gemini succeeds at creating a little insular community where tracking and web analytics are not just forbidden, but impossible.
> It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it.
Possible, but painful. Take HN's official search engine, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/
I open it. "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled" sigh Accept JS from hn.algolia.net and the mangled cloudfront domain (and make sure not to accept ravenjs.com). Possibly cdn.jsdelivr.net if I want to spare a click later, because I don't know if it's useful (it's not). Reload. Now the results are blank. Ah, it makes XHRs to telemetry.algolia.net, a mangled algolia.net domain, and three mangled algolianet.com domains. Think for a second. Accept the latter too (actually, either is enough, but I don't know that). Reload. Oh, it works now.
Luckily there isn't a privacy consent popup I need to reject (or block with uBlock).
It's exhausting to do that almost every time you visit a new website. And with https:// URLs, you don't know ahead of time how many rounds of accepting you'll need to do before opening.
I’m not that familiar with Gemini, but implementing search functionality via Gemtext is impossible right? Would the appropriate comparison not be pages that are similarly static to Gemtext?
I’m not convinced that an entirely new protocol is necessary. How is the Gemini experience different from just browsing all webpages with JS disabled, or if you want to go even further, using a web browser that just doesn’t implement JavaScript?
> It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it.
I've been blocking JS for a damn long time but it just breaks so many things. And if you selectively block JS with umatrix, that also breaks things sometimes.
I gotta say I'm really fed up with playing whack a mole. I'd like to find a corner of the internet where things just work and don't have antifeatures.
Meh, everyone doesn't have to cater to the lowest common denominator all the time. Besides, I can't say I find the geminispehere very elitist or excluding after browsing it on and off for a year or so. There are no gatekeepers apart from accepting the technology itself.
Gemini really doesn't exclude anyone. It's not exactly difficult to use a Gemini to HTTP proxy and you don't lose anything except for access to some weird experiments with the client certificate features.
I mean, ignore away, but I don't think its fair to say that the sole reason for Gemini is exclusion of people.
OP is correct. HTTP/1.1 requires the Host header (1). The client must send it, and the server must reject requests without it. Some implementations simply don't follow the standard. For example, you can test this on twitter.com, which appears to be correctly following the specification.
OP is only correct if using HTTP/1.1 and not 1.0 or 0.9.
I’ve done plenty of telnets using 1.0 without the need for the host header. Just depends on if the server is a dedicated server or running a bunch of hosts (and the default host isn’t the one you want).
My apologies I was being way too pedantic. You're obviously right about the standard and that some implementations do not follow the standard. I'll even admit complete defeat since I must have skipped over this part, "this server accepts." I was really just objecting to the phrasing of "bare minimum" largely because I'd encountered implementations that do not match specification. But also, the part, "for me to request the website from it" does not quite match the language of the rfc. Therefore, my argument has been reduced to "screaming into the void" is a way to request the website from a server.
I wondered the same thing... why invent a whole new thing? Making a web browser capable of displaying the Internet circa 1999 is not trivial but it is far, far, far easier than building a modern one.
I think because the inevitable result of that is that you constantly land on broken pages, just by following links, even if you start in some kind of enthusiast area that caters to such a browser.
You could mitigate that by only linking to pages that implement the HTML subset deemed valid. And instead of linking away to another domain, you could syndicate those pages on a centralized domain so to prevent loading dangerous or slow content on the open web. We could call it something like Accelerated Mobile Pages.
It's about building an ecosystem. Its way easier to build a community of users and content which display on an 80 char terminal when the protocol only supports it and every link links to more content which follows the same restrictions.
IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.
The distinction between devs and users is less sharp when everything is as simple as the Gemini ecosystem. And that is precisely what they want: technology that is resilient and does not (and will never) depend on a caste of specialists and large corporations such as Google, like the web does.
I have sincerely not idea. I skipped over any https talks because it was not fun to look at and assumed folks would have a dependency. There is a list of client/server in a bunch of mainstream languages, did those people had to implement TLS? That sounds like work.
The post is a broad, and IMO, valid criticism. Though I'm not sure having a different protocol is a _huge_ problem. If Gemini ever got popular both backends and clients would add support.
I think the real issue, and the OP touches on it, is the text/gemini format. There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. Specifically, I'm talking about inline-links (though that isn't the only issue).
I wrote a server in elixir, and tried to convert Wikiversity's Introduction to Programming (1) both manually and automatically. I found the output unusable and couldn't come up with a case where I'd ever prefer/recommend it.
> There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini.
That's kind of what I've concluded too. I like the mission of gemini (and I believe the web is fundamentally broken and unrepairable), but I do feel like text/gemini flings way too far in the opposite direction. It's not a new pattern, I see this all the time: thing X is too complex and bloated and user-hostile, let's make a suckless thing Y. Y is minimalistic to a fault.
Making something that's too minimalistic or too complex is easy. Finding the right balance and making something that is small and simple yet still capable of covering wide use scenarios is an engineering challenge..
Since I agree with gemini's mission, I'm not going to complain too much about it. It's not exactly what I want, but if it encourages people to write content and deliver it in a form that is guaranteed not to have web's problems, I'm all for it, because I do stand to benefit from it.
Same as how browsers compete with new HTML tags and such - CommonMark + few extensions could be standardized) with others left to the browsers to decide.
HTML inside markdown is anyway legal as per the standard, so anyone could use <table> for anything complicated anyway.
Such an implementation would also lead to users having more control and say in how the web pages look (similar to Gemini), by letting you read most content across most websites in fonts, styles, and colors of your choosing. This aids a lot in accessibility as well.
Having a new protocol has value for the same reason HAM does. You hope that the character of the content itself will be interesting enough to be it's own subculture.
Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture.
It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations.
Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?
Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: <title>'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky.
> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different,
Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.
> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place
This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.
> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians.
That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin.
The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".
you know, it is possible for a simple piece of technology to ideologically appeal to more than one named region of whatever arbitrary political identity matrix one chooses to view the world through.
> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. [...] Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple [...]. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). [...] Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure [...] but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.
I used to consider myself a left-anarchist, though now I might better be considered a post-left anarchist nowadays. More radical, perhaps in PLA style, is to do away with this silly idea of "human scale"; we have computers, so let's do some computing, and get something interactive like the Web, but from an axiomatic design that is implementable in your lifespan, and ensures privacy and security properties from such axioms.
>This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web.
I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.
I can imagine a 40 year old retired tech guy living off his stocks raising his own chickens, self-declared left-libertarian socialist going "Oh, you use HTTP? That's nice. Corporate? I'm beyond it. I blog on Gemini". At least big corporate makes stuff ordinary people can actually use.
> I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.
I would not describe myself as a left anarchist, but I think that this is an extremely uncharitable analysis of a much more diverse and serious group of people that don't really have anything to do with the things you listed.
"Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians."
Many? How many? Which capsule? Who? How were they identified? What were the numbers for centrists and people who swung the opposite way politically? How was it defined?
I don't want to speak for any individual, but it's pretty clear if you just go through the blogs/social media feeds of any of the major figures in the community. I didn't say it's the only perspective, but it's obviously prevalent
I'm not yet sure how I feel about Gemini (I like inline links), but this post makes me think it's starting to gain some traction. It's past the "first they ignore it" and "then they laugh at it" phases and now into the "then they fight it" phase.
Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)
If you think the web sucks, stop equating people (not companies) building alternatives with Google and Facebook. I think OP is the Judean People's Front while Gemini is the People's Front of Judea. Or something. Who cares?
I guess it depends on how big of a "they" is required -- and if this is an attack, not harsh laughter.
That said, I think Gemini is intentionally designed to be ignored; an enclave or ghetto on the Internet, depending which connotations the speaker wants to have. Its success or failure will depend on its ability to have a self-sustaining community, which is interesting mainly in that discovering Gemini requires finding it via the web at the moment. I suppose there might be a Gemini-IRC connection, too; we will see if Gemini has IRC's longevity.
The way I see it, constant complaints about the web led to Gemini, so the constant complaints about Gemini will inevitably lead to... something else.
Unfortunately, that something else will also be minimalistic, separatist and elitist, just less so than Gemini. It will probably use a strict subset of Markdown and be primarily text-focused and won't support scripting. But rather than "a thousand flowers" blooming we'll just have Gemini and "Gemini lite," because that would satisfy the needs of 99% of the potential audience for such things.
> language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive[...] why not let a thousand flowers bloom?
Because resources are not infinite. Gemini sucks the air out of the room.
> Sometimes an adage is trotted out that goes roughly like this: Welp, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing!¶ And sometimes that's true. It's at least widely understood to be true, I think.¶ What I don't see mentioned, ever, is that sometimes "it's better than nothing" is really, really not true. In some cases, something is _worse_ than nothing.
> I think the real tragedy of Gemini is that although its existence is a reaction to a genuine problem[... i]t's another instance of a bad solution to a problem making that problem worse. This happens when bad solutions capture the attention of people concerned with and/or affected by the problem, and then they divert resources away[...] instead of allowing those resources to be better put to good use
Yeah, I just axiomatically disagree with this sort of control-obsessed, zero-sum thinking. Good ideas have always had to compete with other new ideas in addition with incumbent old ones. There is always an organizational challenge in addition to the technical one. If whatever you want to happen is threatened by Gemini, it's not good enough. If you want to wait until everyone else stops trying new ideas, please say hello to the heat death of the universe for me.
I don't know what you mean by "control-obsessed", and I'm not a zero-summer generally, but zero-summability is relevant to what's going on with Gemini. A person who spends 250 man-hours working on Gemini is not going to get that back. Likewise, a project that would have benefited from that person's enthusiasm had Gemini not existed is not going to.
> If whatever you want to happen is threatened by Gemini
I don't think you're conceptualizing the criticism correctly. This is not "B is better than A". This is a case where B never comes along because A exists. The person who would otherwise catalyze B's existence and success doesn't, because they think that A is sufficient and/or anyone they might talk to about B would just respond, "I dunno; isn't that what A is for?" You can see this with Mozilla, for example. (As a former Mozillian, that's what I had in mind at the time I wrote the linked blog post.) I have become especially sensitive to this after my experience between 2006–2013 and seeing the contrast of that time period vs Mozilla's role over the last 10 years—which is basically a black hole that keeps people from effectively organizing anything that resembles the early days of Firefox development. I recognized something similar after moving to Austin in 2014 and signing up for lots of volunteer events that were by-and-large just organized to be ways for affluent young professionals to feel like they're doing good by burning their attention surpluses, whether or not any of those events were actually a worthwhile use of those resources. See also:
> I don't think you're conceptualizing the criticism correctly. This is not "B is better than A". This is a case where B never comes along because A exists.
This risk is omnipresent in the universe. We never know what possible futures we cut off when we make a fork in the road. You don't ever step into the same river twice. However, this risk also applies to the projects you like. If we all worried about this we'd not do anything. Rhetoric like "Gemini sucking the air out of the room," "person who spends 250 hours working on Gemini," "it's like voluntourism," -- I could just as well replace Gemini with triplescripts throughout your comments.
No, you could only do that if the basis of my comment were about generic, FOMO-driven hand-wringing, where A is unbound, so substitute any A and the criticism remains true. That's not what we're talking about. The criticism involves the observation that Gemini, specifically, is bad.
If Gemini specifically is bad, you should be able to argue that without making these other arguments that apply to any new project. Convince people they shouldn't care about it. So far I haven't found that side compelling. If you concentrate your energies there, I might.
They can't be applied to any new project. I don't know why you're ignoring this, even with the clarification using the well-understood concept of free vs bound variables. "These other arguments" are a direct response to the question you posed <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068014>.
My position is something that I know you already agree with. You can't write, "Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo" and think that my argument is unsound—because it's the same concept.
> If you concentrate your energies there
The last thing that we need is _more_ energy being lost to the Gemini sinkhole. That's the whole point!
I don't understand. What clarification? I don't see any mention of free vs bound variables anywhere in this thread or your links. I meant energies in describing the technical shortcomings of Gemini, and concentrating all the energy you're already willing to expend, not adding more. If you're tired of arguing, so am I. I'll step away now.
> > This risk is omnipresent in the universe[...] If we all worried about this we'd not do anything. Rhetoric like "Gemini sucking the air out of the room," "person who spends 250 hours working on Gemini,"[...] I could just as well replace Gemini with[...]
> you could only do that if the basis of my comment were about generic, FOMO-driven hand-wringing, where A is unbound, so substitute any A and the criticism remains true. That's not what we're talking about.
Gemini devs could have contributed to something else? Sure. They didn't, though.
Historians avoid counterfactual arguments because they lead nowhere. Perhaps the timeline without Gemini is worse. Perhaps it's better. Not possible to say. Best to just live in the moment.
> Gemini devs could have contributed to something else?
Not the argument I'm making. I'm observing that others' energy that gets captured (or more accurately, spent; i.e., fails to be captured for use elsewhere) as a consequence of Gemini's gravity is wasted. It's necessary to make a distinction between Gemini's originators and people sucked into its orbit.
Admittedly I up voted this not because I agree with it, but because I want more people talking about Gemini, both for and against it since it leads to healthy and constructive debate on a new technology.
I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown.
Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.
If that is the extent of this line of reasoning then I guess I am in agreement with dvt. That doesn't seem "bad" to me in the least. I thought cr__ was sharing new information regarding the often criticized study I linked above.
It's not that they have a plan to abuse people for money. It's just that being opposite of boring gives them profit. Outrage brings engagement. Engagement brings time on the platform and ad clicks.
Let's be honest, 99% of what your grandma has to tell you could be put in an email with no intermediating parties. The web is totally unnecessary for that.
If your grandma can install a web browser, she could install lagrange. If she knows how to navigate to 'facebook.com,' she can navigate to a gemini URL. If gemini got enough user share, lagrange or something similar would come installed on a computer by default. Gemini is not all that hard to use. From the user perspective, it is just like using Chrome, but the websites are more basic.
> The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma
I'd say the fact that your grandma has to use FB instead of publish on the Web itself is exactly why it sucks. What most people are using isn't really the Web, but apps that happen to (ab)use the Web. Many of which don't even use the Web for the app, but just redirect you to a mobile app instead.
Now I don't think Gemini is actually fixing any of this, but I do feel that the Web today is fundamentally broken and the lack of self-publishing is disheartening, though understandable given that the Web makes it far from easy.
It's not prevented by being its own protocol, only delayed. HTTP was pretty simple at the start, then it got popular and more features got added to satisfy more users. There is no law of nature or humans which prevents Gemini from being hijacked by others later if it becomes popular enough. And if it stays niche, then the current (developer-heavy) community can keep it as simple as they want.
There's something to be said about limits. Interesting things happen when you set limitations. The Oulipo group, made up of writers like Perec and Calvino, would intentionally set limits in order to spur creativity. What's the harm in having a web protocol like Gemini attempting to do the same thing? The modern web is bloated, captured, no longer uncharted land waiting to be explored. Why not refuse and set off into the waters of Gemini? What do you have to lose?
I agree with the author, but from a different direction. The Gemini community has this ethos that stripping away all the styling etc. makes the internet about "content" again. Setting aside for the moment that the definition that content = text is unnecessarily reductive (and insulting to other forms of content - is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content?), in my experience - people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols.
The people whose content I most respect are writing into a blogger setup that hasn't changed for decades, or into Wordpress's editor that feels like it actively fights you when you want to write. They like making it look like they want it to, and they like having analytics or getting paid for their content with ads or subscriptions. And on the other hand, barring one notable exception I haven't found anybody in the gemini space whose content I found interesting in itself. (Of course, that's just personal opinion - you might find many more people in the gemini space interesting.) And the moment I realized that a significant portion of the content on the gemini space was about implementing a gemini reader, it hit me that it was pure solutionism. Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!
(I could also go on about how the idea that stripping content of styles or """fluff""" is the only way for readers to get it on their own terms. I use stylus to override the font on every website I visit - it didn't require reinventing the wheel for that!)
The great thing about the web when I came along with was all the character, good, bad or otherwise that personal sites, even some corporate sites that people build had.
GeoCities came along and things could be ugly, but it felt genuine.
Even just background choices or ugly gifs…
I miss the personal wonkiness and folks not afraid to make ugly sites.
The race to ultra minimalism feels as cold as a Facebook profile, maybe more.
It's only a recurrent pattern because the capitalist machine is destroying creativity/leeway. Just like nature produces tomatoes (and other fruits/vegetables) of every color, but good luck finding a tomato that's not red in a supermarket.
Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctrination (schools/media) to persuade the weird folks from being weird, we'll see more and more unique stuff.
Plausible but I think it's more generic than that. Evolution also filters out a lot of "creative" designs. Probably not as much as finance based markets I guess.
I noticed this with restaurants. Old location (Australia): you drive to a McDonald's and get a quarter pounder. New location (Europe): you walk down the street and there are heaps of little unique eating places and small chains.
What causes the difference? I don't know. It might be down to city planning causing people to walk more and reducing the friction of entering a random store to get lunch. It could be something to do with real estate laws. It might just be cultural expectations.
Point is, this "big chain culture" is not universal and not inevitable. It's something we humans created in certain areas.
It has to do with the economic system and local urban planning. Many cities in Europe have refused permits for Mac Donald's to open shop, and that's a good thing. Because once settled, these megacorps who pay less than 1% taxes will take away all the business because they can have a bigger variety of products/services that a small shop can't afford, at a price driven by economies of scale that a small shop can't afford, treating employees in an illegal manner that a small shop can't afford to go to court over, and avoiding taxes through loopholes which small shops can't afford to know about.
If you can, don't let chains setup store near your home. If you can't, seriously consider getting involved in sabotage operations with people you trust. That's how Google ended backing off from Kreuzberg (Berlin) a few years back. Mac Donald's also had a few famous burnt-down "restaurants" here in France, but sabotage doesn't have to involve flames. A pack of sugar down the concrete-mixer will do the trick. If the shop has opened already, anything to block the locks will block business for at least a few hours.
It's David vs Goliath but if you've got support from your neighborhood you can win. Just don't ever think police and politicians are on your side.
That's part of what's frustrating me about this! Usually non-profit projects/protocols are extensible, like the web and the Internet. This, despite the fact that for-profit corps try to appropriate/destroy the free/extensible platforms just like Microsoft/AOL tried with the Internet in the 90s.
So here, we end up in a situation that because silicon valley moguls exploited an extensible protocol (by hijacking the standardizing committee to their profit) we adopt a self-defense reflex of making everything minimalist to reduce the attack surface.
I'm interested in low-tech/ecology in general. For me, the equivalent in the physical world would be if you're not happy with a house using too much resources/energy so you decide to live without walls or floor, with a simple ceiling over the head. Sure it does the job of protecting you from rainfall, but does it fit all the other functionalities we expect from a home? I'm much more interested in a clay-based (or other local materials) housing, personally.
I agree with your critique of capitalism, but beware the naturalistic fallacy: nature is similarly efficient and ruthless.
Wild tomatoes are red, tiny, and barely useful as food. The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.
> The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.
They've been groomed for generations, yes. But they've not been stabilized. When i talk about the variety of tomato colors/tastes, this is something natural that will happen over a few generations in your garden.
Plants will often borrow taste from other surrounding plants, as for color i have no clue what triggers them to change, but i've seen with my own eyes after a few years, new generations of vegetables starting to change colors (not uniformly across the entire garden). This of course is not possible with trees (eg. apples/oranges) as you would need to wait several generations of trees (that's a long time), nor is it possible when you plant seeds from the supermarket every year to replace last year's plants, as the commercial seeds are almost bit-by-bit copies of one another and will yield the same tasteless tomatoes bypassing the natural circle of evolution to your local environment.
If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops. At least that's the case here in France, where the government for many years made it illegal/criminal to share or sell "peasant crops" (which a judge ruled is legal only a few years back).
> They've been groomed for generations, yes. But they've not been stabilized.
You must be using a different definition of “stabilized” than the horticultural sense, because it is absurd to suggest that tomato varieties are not stable.
> If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops.
I’m a member of a seed saving exchange and active in my local growing community. Horticulture is my primary hobby.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ made the interesting observation that a big chunk of that amateur OG internet never stopped or went away, Google etc. just stopped linking to it and it went invisible.
Without numbers, it's hard to say how much of it is left. However, I do believe that a big chunk left and mere tiny bits of it are left. And of course, archives of old and now dead things..
The vast majority of people on the internet are not ever exposed to that kind of web (and most of those who were have moved on). How does someone even find out such a thing exists? How does someone figure out how to participate, if their entire web experience comes from facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram era?
In the 90s, the original amateur internet was something you'd be inevitably exposed to if you did anything at all on the web. Geocities was a thing, ISPs often offered free space for hosting personal home pages. I saw normies, total non-geeks make personal home pages because that's just the kind of thing people found on the web and wanted to try. My older sister had her own homepage. She's not a programmer and not a geek. Her site was a part of some webring, linking other sites made by teenage girls..
"Social media" was forums, likewise hosted by individuals, often in conjunction with their personal home pages, linking to other such sites...
> people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols.
> Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!
I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2020, The only thing being produced on Gemini now is "content", and there's more of it than ever!
Well, it still doesn’t seem to have escaped the narrow community of “geeks who are into tech-related things”. I’d really like to see things that I don’t already see on places like HN (because for these things I’ll just use HN).
I don't think gopher/gemini is geeks only, and the overlap with HN is certainly small. It's very popular in some communities such as the tildeverse where less-techie folks write on gemini as well. Last time i surfed on gemini (like a year ago) i was surprised there was so little technical content.
"Bikeshedding about internet protocols" doesn't mean bikeshedding the gemini protocol specifically. The Gemini protocol is stable, I'm sure, but what I mean is that people are more interested in discussing the tech especially vs http or whatever.
> Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things.
I strongly disagree. By willingly limiting the markup, gemini actively tries to prevent you from doing these things. In contrast, what's wrong with the web is everything JavaScript and some early design issues with CSS, but HTML is good (although it could be simplified/improved).
xHTML more specifically is easy to parse and extensible so that different clients can implement more features. We need more HTML less JavaScript. In this sense, going the gopher route is a step backwards in my view, because it means for most of my practical needs (such as a simple user-submitted form) i need to stick with the web as we know it while i would be more than happy to take part and contribute in a privacy-friendly/minimalist subset of the web (as a standard i mean, i already do that on my websites).
I respect your disagreement, but I feel like you're disagreeing against the wrong point here though.
The main difference between gemini (the protocol) and http, isn't that a gemini page need only contain text and be deprived of all other kinds of context. The gemini protocol does not stop you from interacting with specific filetypes or other protocols, any more than http does. It's a protocol. It's up to people implementing clients to the gemini protocol to decide how to handle such externalities.
E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page, which I like. I haven't tried audio files, but I imagine they could probably work similarly if necessary.
Along similar lines, the gemtext specification is not intended as some sort of viable html alternative. It has completely different design goals.
So no, the point isn't about limiting the kind of content you can interact with. The point is, by enforcing a degree of separation between what is "content" (i.e. text), and what is "externalities", this makes simplicity of text (both in terms of presentation and production) the main driver, leaving externalities up to implementations (which may be as simple as encouraging actual external use, including an http browser for http content). More importantly, this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster, whose agenda may not match yours as a user.
And some (including myself) actually like this separation.
> E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page
That's true, but it's based on opportunistic guesses, not semantics, which prevents many use-cases (including alt-text for accessibility of images). For example, we could do the same with video, but what about alternative soundtracks/captions? HTML has <video> <audio> and <caption>. Building a browser based on auto-guessing which link is related to which one and what the relationship is between those is... hazardous in my view.
> this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster
I love that argument! But that was also the premise for the web, and i don't understand why we're not enforcing it there. CSS was supposed to permit user stylesheets, and JS empower users to script their interactions with the server. I would argue the problem with the web is it has moved away from declarative to imperative model where the server dictates your rendering. I can see how gemini addresses this by removing extensible declarative elements altogether, but i don't think that's the only way.
Personally, i think adding more semantic elements in HTML (eg. no-JS web components) would make client-side sheets more realistic while allowing the webmaster to propose a specific stylesheet for their recommended UI/UX. Removing the semantics is not gonna help empower clients, except when it comes to plaintext content. So, adding a new content-type over HTTP? Sure. Just throw in some CommonMark: it's well-specified and more or less complete (depending on your use-case). Adding a simpler protocol for delivering content? Why not, but it's not that easy to future-proof: HTTP is arguably more complex, but has some interesting properties such as content-type/encoding negociation or decoupling from transport security (for .onion/.i2p/DANE or any other future technology).
Just to be clear i like gemini very much and i've been wanting to support gemlog to my blog for a while. I just think there's room for some other technical foundations to explore the political promises of gemini.
I don't often use Gemini, but here's the thing that I think this misses and that Gemini does well:
If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast.
Yes, I can use NoScript, uBlock Origin with comprehensive lists, etc. and start to approach that level of simplicity... but every other link I click will likely be broken in weird and wonderful ways. In Gemini, they all work (provided the page still exists, of course). I think there's some value in that.
> If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast.
With a `text/gemini` content type over HTTP/1.1 you could just use cURL, wget or fancier stuff like w3m/lynx and get the exact same benefits but would not need to install yet another internet facing tool that may even get things wrong security wise (even with simple stuff a possibility).
It seems to me like the author is experiencing how the web itself feels if you try to step off the browser upgrade treadmill or use an older computer. A website refuses HTTP and you don't have recent TLS certs? Tough luck, pal. This page dynamically loads content with JS? Buzz off, guy using Links. Can't pay your online bills or join a video chat because you aren't using Chrome? Get with the times, grandma, and surrender to the new flesh!
There will come a point- and for some things we're already past it- where there is exactly one viable web browser, and it is controlled by a company that sells ads. This is why Gemini exists.
The author isn't considering how lack of features can be useful. Just like the lack of gotos in a language allows you to make many assumptions about a program, Gemini lacks just about every mechanism for fingerprinting and tracking that's become an inherent risk of accessing web pages, hugely reducing surface area for attacks.
Even lack of styling with every page looking about the same can be considered a feature, everything looks familiar and we aren't inconvenienced by bad design decisions.
Gemini's most distinguishing feature seems to be that it is considered feature complete. If everything goes as planned, even decades from now building a usable gemini client should be easily doable. Completely unlike web browsers which started off with fairly simple html but picked up a lot of bloat over the last few decades. This alone might make Gemini worth it.
You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.
It pretty much would. You couldn't link to the HTTP-Markdown-Web from the HTTP-HTML-Web (normal browsers don't and won't support Markdown) and you couldn't link to the HTTP-HTML-Web from the HTTP-Markdown-Web (the Markdown browser doesn't and won't support HTML)
(Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
I don’t think you fully understand what I’m proposing.
You create a set of conventions that “Gemini compatible” websites conform to. This will allow your site to work with small Gemini-only browsers. Those conventions mostly amount to sending markdown for URLs when the user agent sends “accept: application/x-Gemini-markdown” (or whatever the mime type would be). Web servers send the markdown to Gemini user agents while they send normal html to browsers that don’t send the Accept header.
To signify that the site is a “Gemini site” at the URL level you can create a convention that the url must end in “.gemini” e.g. https://foo.com/blog.gemini
> (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
I don’t see how sending a different file based on an accept header is any more technically unrealistic than creating an entirely new technology stack.
Your "Accept: application/x-Gemini-markdown" might as well be "Accept: text/html-without-ads-or-scripts-please" and then there is no need to write an additional document parser.
Well the html format does allow for JavaScript, images, etc. Not to mention it allows for arbitrary document hierarchy. it would be a large cognitive burden on users who are publishing content to remember what is the gemini-supported subset of html that is allowed. It would also be hard to standardize the subset and prevent the subset from growing.
What Gemini got right is that simplifying and limiting the publishing format prevents bloat.
That's a massively more complex implementation for no benefit.
Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link.
A key feature of Gemini browsers is to visually distinguish between links to Gemini:// URLs and links to HTTP:// URLs.
> That's a massively more complex implementation for no benefit.
It’s barely complex. It’s a standard dispatch on the accept header, all major web servers handle this out of the box. Also it has the significant benefit of working with existing browsers. On what basis were you making that statement?
> Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link.
You can accomplish the same URL transparency by using a file extension convention. E.g. “https://foo.com/my log.gemini”
> I meant that an implementation of HTTP is massively more complex than an implementation of Gemini.
The subset of http necessary to support Gemini-style requests is really not complex at all. I’ve written basic http servers in hours if not minutes.
> The extension shouldn't be `.gemini` it should be `.this-is-not-malware-i-super-pinky-promise`
If you are someone who uses what I’m calling “http-Gemini” because they are worried about malware then use the stripped down “http Gemini” browser. For the rest of the world who is already comfortable with potential malware in their links, there is no change. The control stays in the user’s hands.
My understanding was that making it difficult to connect to, in order to keep out people who wouldn’t/couldn’t meet the bar, was an intended benefit and not an accident (whether that’s a good idea or not is an exercise for the reader, but the premise of this article seems to assume that it wasn’t the intent.)
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadIt's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image.
If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors.
What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that?
One answer is to publish over Gemini.
[1] https://beakerbrowser.com/
I had never heard about Gemini before this thread. So after skimming, I read the Gemini FAQ, then went back and re-read the article.
The author completely missed the point and began a technical discussion.
Kind of similar to that dev you work with that gets psyched about a solution, and doesn't stop to ask "do we need to solve this problem?"
That means if I want to use Gemini I would have to add a whole other browser to my computer and switch between the two while browsing which is super annoying. At that point I just won't bother.
What is the end game here? Do they want all websites to switch to Gemini? Do they expect people to use two browsers? Are they saying that anything that can't be built on Gemini should be a Native App?
If you're not going to install Lagrange, I'm doubtful that you're going to install an extension either. This isn't about you personally, it's a statistical judgment about the market segment you're signalling yourself to belong to. People reluctant to install native software are also unlikely to install extensions.
Having a separate app provides some additional protection compared to an extension that can look over your shoulder at everything you browse. Lagrange runs in a separate process entirely, and it can only snoop on the Gemini websites I visit.
Re endgame, see 1.6 at https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
Me, I go to Gemini (and Mastodon, and the tildeverse, and plan.cat, and twtxt, and, and..) precisely because it has no hope in hell of adoption. If someone's posting there they're intrinsically motivated[1]. That's the stuff I want to look at. When I'm in small pools like these I'm less legible[2] to marketers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic
[2] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.
> elitism (n.) the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society.
where does this idea come from? why can't people make their own spaces in their own corners of the Internet without being considered "elitist?"
is HN "elitist"? 4chan? Usenet? ZeroNet?
Yes; very much so, particularly those first two which are widely known for it.
IOW a web that's safe and user-controlled, again. Just a damn hypertext document browser that doesn't also bundle a spying suite and hand control of it to anyone by default. We should have realized when people started putting up troll pages that broke your computer simply by using JavaScript's normal capabilities, that we needed to seriously rethink including a scripting language with all kinds of ability to act against the user just because they followed a link, as part of the Web. We didn't do that, though, and instead we got gestures at everything.
I'm not sure Gemini's the right solution, but that would be a nice thing to have, which we do not have now.
It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it. You don't have to throw the baby (gemtext missing inline links!) out with the bathwater.
I like that the protocols prevent any abuse.
There are all sorts of uses for cryptographic proofs; e.g. you can sign a document and prove that you were the one who signed it, or you can do a bunch of double-SHA hashes and prove ownership of a Bitcoin, you can prove via a SSL certificate that the content that claims to come from somedomain.example actually does, etc etc.
But there's no way, via currently existing protocols, to deliver a document with a proof that the document does not contain code designed to track the user or that the document will display properly without running arbitrary scripts.
Gemini is bikeshedding, yes. But it solves this social problem - a problem of expectations. You can't make a webpage with tracking scripts and deliver it over Gemeni because there's no point. No one who received the document would actually execute any of the scripts. So Gemini succeeds at creating a little insular community where tracking and web analytics are not just forbidden, but impossible.
Possible, but painful. Take HN's official search engine, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/
I open it. "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled" sigh Accept JS from hn.algolia.net and the mangled cloudfront domain (and make sure not to accept ravenjs.com). Possibly cdn.jsdelivr.net if I want to spare a click later, because I don't know if it's useful (it's not). Reload. Now the results are blank. Ah, it makes XHRs to telemetry.algolia.net, a mangled algolia.net domain, and three mangled algolianet.com domains. Think for a second. Accept the latter too (actually, either is enough, but I don't know that). Reload. Oh, it works now. Luckily there isn't a privacy consent popup I need to reject (or block with uBlock).
It's exhausting to do that almost every time you visit a new website. And with https:// URLs, you don't know ahead of time how many rounds of accepting you'll need to do before opening.
I’m not convinced that an entirely new protocol is necessary. How is the Gemini experience different from just browsing all webpages with JS disabled, or if you want to go even further, using a web browser that just doesn’t implement JavaScript?
[1] gopher://forthworks.com/1/contrition
I've been blocking JS for a damn long time but it just breaks so many things. And if you selectively block JS with umatrix, that also breaks things sometimes.
I gotta say I'm really fed up with playing whack a mole. I'd like to find a corner of the internet where things just work and don't have antifeatures.
Not every single thing has to include every single person on earth. If people want to use Gemini good for them.
I mean, ignore away, but I don't think its fair to say that the sole reason for Gemini is exclusion of people.
I use the telnet trick often as debug step number one.
(1) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4
The example shown returns a 400 for me without a Host header.
I’ve done plenty of telnets using 1.0 without the need for the host header. Just depends on if the server is a dedicated server or running a bunch of hosts (and the default host isn’t the one you want).
Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.
IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.
I think the real issue, and the OP touches on it, is the text/gemini format. There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. Specifically, I'm talking about inline-links (though that isn't the only issue).
I wrote a server in elixir, and tried to convert Wikiversity's Introduction to Programming (1) both manually and automatically. I found the output unusable and couldn't come up with a case where I'd ever prefer/recommend it.
(1) https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Programming
That's kind of what I've concluded too. I like the mission of gemini (and I believe the web is fundamentally broken and unrepairable), but I do feel like text/gemini flings way too far in the opposite direction. It's not a new pattern, I see this all the time: thing X is too complex and bloated and user-hostile, let's make a suckless thing Y. Y is minimalistic to a fault.
Making something that's too minimalistic or too complex is easy. Finding the right balance and making something that is small and simple yet still capable of covering wide use scenarios is an engineering challenge..
Since I agree with gemini's mission, I'm not going to complain too much about it. It's not exactly what I want, but if it encourages people to write content and deliver it in a form that is guaranteed not to have web's problems, I'm all for it, because I do stand to benefit from it.
HTML inside markdown is anyway legal as per the standard, so anyone could use <table> for anything complicated anyway.
Such an implementation would also lead to users having more control and say in how the web pages look (similar to Gemini), by letting you read most content across most websites in fonts, styles, and colors of your choosing. This aids a lot in accessibility as well.
Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture.
It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations.
Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/
It's an aggregator of sorts, but with a bit of a twist.
Clients, for the terminal I recommend Amfora
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
and Lagrange is a great GUI client
https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: <title>'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky.
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...
Oops, what happened? Now that was short lived.. EDIT: apparently hardware failure
Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.
> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place
This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.
That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin.
The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".
I used to consider myself a left-anarchist, though now I might better be considered a post-left anarchist nowadays. More radical, perhaps in PLA style, is to do away with this silly idea of "human scale"; we have computers, so let's do some computing, and get something interactive like the Web, but from an axiomatic design that is implementable in your lifespan, and ensures privacy and security properties from such axioms.
https://applied-langua.ge/posts/terminal-boredom.html is a longer form writeup on this line of thought.
I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.
I can imagine a 40 year old retired tech guy living off his stocks raising his own chickens, self-declared left-libertarian socialist going "Oh, you use HTTP? That's nice. Corporate? I'm beyond it. I blog on Gemini". At least big corporate makes stuff ordinary people can actually use.
I would not describe myself as a left anarchist, but I think that this is an extremely uncharitable analysis of a much more diverse and serious group of people that don't really have anything to do with the things you listed.
Many? How many? Which capsule? Who? How were they identified? What were the numbers for centrists and people who swung the opposite way politically? How was it defined?
Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)
Here's an example of the connotations the term "solutionism" has: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/09/evgeny-mo.... It does not apply here, to put it mildly.
That said, I think Gemini is intentionally designed to be ignored; an enclave or ghetto on the Internet, depending which connotations the speaker wants to have. Its success or failure will depend on its ability to have a self-sustaining community, which is interesting mainly in that discovering Gemini requires finding it via the web at the moment. I suppose there might be a Gemini-IRC connection, too; we will see if Gemini has IRC's longevity.
That's... probably a poor figure of speech to use as encouragement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
Unfortunately, that something else will also be minimalistic, separatist and elitist, just less so than Gemini. It will probably use a strict subset of Markdown and be primarily text-focused and won't support scripting. But rather than "a thousand flowers" blooming we'll just have Gemini and "Gemini lite," because that would satisfy the needs of 99% of the potential audience for such things.
Because resources are not infinite. Gemini sucks the air out of the room.
> Sometimes an adage is trotted out that goes roughly like this: Welp, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing!¶ And sometimes that's true. It's at least widely understood to be true, I think.¶ What I don't see mentioned, ever, is that sometimes "it's better than nothing" is really, really not true. In some cases, something is _worse_ than nothing.
<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
> I think the real tragedy of Gemini is that although its existence is a reaction to a genuine problem[... i]t's another instance of a bad solution to a problem making that problem worse. This happens when bad solutions capture the attention of people concerned with and/or affected by the problem, and then they divert resources away[...] instead of allowing those resources to be better put to good use
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25811478>
> If whatever you want to happen is threatened by Gemini
I don't think you're conceptualizing the criticism correctly. This is not "B is better than A". This is a case where B never comes along because A exists. The person who would otherwise catalyze B's existence and success doesn't, because they think that A is sufficient and/or anyone they might talk to about B would just respond, "I dunno; isn't that what A is for?" You can see this with Mozilla, for example. (As a former Mozillian, that's what I had in mind at the time I wrote the linked blog post.) I have become especially sensitive to this after my experience between 2006–2013 and seeing the contrast of that time period vs Mozilla's role over the last 10 years—which is basically a black hole that keeps people from effectively organizing anything that resembles the early days of Firefox development. I recognized something similar after moving to Austin in 2014 and signing up for lots of volunteer events that were by-and-large just organized to be ways for affluent young professionals to feel like they're doing good by burning their attention surpluses, whether or not any of those events were actually a worthwhile use of those resources. See also:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10029811
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
> If you want to wait until everyone else stops trying new ideas
That's the opposite of my position—which is that Gemini is sucking the air out of the room.
This risk is omnipresent in the universe. We never know what possible futures we cut off when we make a fork in the road. You don't ever step into the same river twice. However, this risk also applies to the projects you like. If we all worried about this we'd not do anything. Rhetoric like "Gemini sucking the air out of the room," "person who spends 250 hours working on Gemini," "it's like voluntourism," -- I could just as well replace Gemini with triplescripts throughout your comments.
My position is something that I know you already agree with. You can't write, "Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo" and think that my argument is unsound—because it's the same concept.
> If you concentrate your energies there
The last thing that we need is _more_ energy being lost to the Gemini sinkhole. That's the whole point!
> you could only do that if the basis of my comment were about generic, FOMO-driven hand-wringing, where A is unbound, so substitute any A and the criticism remains true. That's not what we're talking about.
Historians avoid counterfactual arguments because they lead nowhere. Perhaps the timeline without Gemini is worse. Perhaps it's better. Not possible to say. Best to just live in the moment.
What projects would you prefer them to work on?
Not the argument I'm making. I'm observing that others' energy that gets captured (or more accurately, spent; i.e., fails to be captured for use elsewhere) as a consequence of Gemini's gravity is wasted. It's necessary to make a distinction between Gemini's originators and people sucked into its orbit.
I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown.
Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.
Can you share more on this? I've heard they conducted large-scale studies of emotional state[1], but I never heard about a link to profit before.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788
A lot of usable things suck.
I'd say the fact that your grandma has to use FB instead of publish on the Web itself is exactly why it sucks. What most people are using isn't really the Web, but apps that happen to (ab)use the Web. Many of which don't even use the Web for the app, but just redirect you to a mobile app instead.
Now I don't think Gemini is actually fixing any of this, but I do feel that the Web today is fundamentally broken and the lack of self-publishing is disheartening, though understandable given that the Web makes it far from easy.
The people whose content I most respect are writing into a blogger setup that hasn't changed for decades, or into Wordpress's editor that feels like it actively fights you when you want to write. They like making it look like they want it to, and they like having analytics or getting paid for their content with ads or subscriptions. And on the other hand, barring one notable exception I haven't found anybody in the gemini space whose content I found interesting in itself. (Of course, that's just personal opinion - you might find many more people in the gemini space interesting.) And the moment I realized that a significant portion of the content on the gemini space was about implementing a gemini reader, it hit me that it was pure solutionism. Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!
(I could also go on about how the idea that stripping content of styles or """fluff""" is the only way for readers to get it on their own terms. I use stylus to override the font on every website I visit - it didn't require reinventing the wheel for that!)
GeoCities came along and things could be ugly, but it felt genuine.
Even just background choices or ugly gifs…
I miss the personal wonkiness and folks not afraid to make ugly sites.
The race to ultra minimalism feels as cold as a Facebook profile, maybe more.
I do miss these days too.
Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctrination (schools/media) to persuade the weird folks from being weird, we'll see more and more unique stuff.
What causes the difference? I don't know. It might be down to city planning causing people to walk more and reducing the friction of entering a random store to get lunch. It could be something to do with real estate laws. It might just be cultural expectations.
Point is, this "big chain culture" is not universal and not inevitable. It's something we humans created in certain areas.
If you can, don't let chains setup store near your home. If you can't, seriously consider getting involved in sabotage operations with people you trust. That's how Google ended backing off from Kreuzberg (Berlin) a few years back. Mac Donald's also had a few famous burnt-down "restaurants" here in France, but sabotage doesn't have to involve flames. A pack of sugar down the concrete-mixer will do the trick. If the shop has opened already, anything to block the locks will block business for at least a few hours.
It's David vs Goliath but if you've got support from your neighborhood you can win. Just don't ever think police and politicians are on your side.
So here, we end up in a situation that because silicon valley moguls exploited an extensible protocol (by hijacking the standardizing committee to their profit) we adopt a self-defense reflex of making everything minimalist to reduce the attack surface.
I'm interested in low-tech/ecology in general. For me, the equivalent in the physical world would be if you're not happy with a house using too much resources/energy so you decide to live without walls or floor, with a simple ceiling over the head. Sure it does the job of protecting you from rainfall, but does it fit all the other functionalities we expect from a home? I'm much more interested in a clay-based (or other local materials) housing, personally.
And Gemini in this case is happy to achieve the same result.
Wild tomatoes are red, tiny, and barely useful as food. The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.
They've been groomed for generations, yes. But they've not been stabilized. When i talk about the variety of tomato colors/tastes, this is something natural that will happen over a few generations in your garden.
Plants will often borrow taste from other surrounding plants, as for color i have no clue what triggers them to change, but i've seen with my own eyes after a few years, new generations of vegetables starting to change colors (not uniformly across the entire garden). This of course is not possible with trees (eg. apples/oranges) as you would need to wait several generations of trees (that's a long time), nor is it possible when you plant seeds from the supermarket every year to replace last year's plants, as the commercial seeds are almost bit-by-bit copies of one another and will yield the same tasteless tomatoes bypassing the natural circle of evolution to your local environment.
If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops. At least that's the case here in France, where the government for many years made it illegal/criminal to share or sell "peasant crops" (which a judge ruled is legal only a few years back).
You must be using a different definition of “stabilized” than the horticultural sense, because it is absurd to suggest that tomato varieties are not stable.
> If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops.
I’m a member of a seed saving exchange and active in my local growing community. Horticulture is my primary hobby.
The vast majority of people on the internet are not ever exposed to that kind of web (and most of those who were have moved on). How does someone even find out such a thing exists? How does someone figure out how to participate, if their entire web experience comes from facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram era?
In the 90s, the original amateur internet was something you'd be inevitably exposed to if you did anything at all on the web. Geocities was a thing, ISPs often offered free space for hosting personal home pages. I saw normies, total non-geeks make personal home pages because that's just the kind of thing people found on the web and wanted to try. My older sister had her own homepage. She's not a programmer and not a geek. Her site was a part of some webring, linking other sites made by teenage girls..
"Social media" was forums, likewise hosted by individuals, often in conjunction with their personal home pages, linking to other such sites...
I think the vast majority of it is simply gone.
> Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!
I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2020, The only thing being produced on Gemini now is "content", and there's more of it than ever!
Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. It simply enforces a separation of those experiences from the text.
The reason this is a bad thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create rich user experiences.
The reason this is a good thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create "rich" user experiences.
I strongly disagree. By willingly limiting the markup, gemini actively tries to prevent you from doing these things. In contrast, what's wrong with the web is everything JavaScript and some early design issues with CSS, but HTML is good (although it could be simplified/improved).
xHTML more specifically is easy to parse and extensible so that different clients can implement more features. We need more HTML less JavaScript. In this sense, going the gopher route is a step backwards in my view, because it means for most of my practical needs (such as a simple user-submitted form) i need to stick with the web as we know it while i would be more than happy to take part and contribute in a privacy-friendly/minimalist subset of the web (as a standard i mean, i already do that on my websites).
The main difference between gemini (the protocol) and http, isn't that a gemini page need only contain text and be deprived of all other kinds of context. The gemini protocol does not stop you from interacting with specific filetypes or other protocols, any more than http does. It's a protocol. It's up to people implementing clients to the gemini protocol to decide how to handle such externalities.
E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page, which I like. I haven't tried audio files, but I imagine they could probably work similarly if necessary.
Along similar lines, the gemtext specification is not intended as some sort of viable html alternative. It has completely different design goals.
So no, the point isn't about limiting the kind of content you can interact with. The point is, by enforcing a degree of separation between what is "content" (i.e. text), and what is "externalities", this makes simplicity of text (both in terms of presentation and production) the main driver, leaving externalities up to implementations (which may be as simple as encouraging actual external use, including an http browser for http content). More importantly, this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster, whose agenda may not match yours as a user.
And some (including myself) actually like this separation.
That's true, but it's based on opportunistic guesses, not semantics, which prevents many use-cases (including alt-text for accessibility of images). For example, we could do the same with video, but what about alternative soundtracks/captions? HTML has <video> <audio> and <caption>. Building a browser based on auto-guessing which link is related to which one and what the relationship is between those is... hazardous in my view.
> this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster
I love that argument! But that was also the premise for the web, and i don't understand why we're not enforcing it there. CSS was supposed to permit user stylesheets, and JS empower users to script their interactions with the server. I would argue the problem with the web is it has moved away from declarative to imperative model where the server dictates your rendering. I can see how gemini addresses this by removing extensible declarative elements altogether, but i don't think that's the only way.
Personally, i think adding more semantic elements in HTML (eg. no-JS web components) would make client-side sheets more realistic while allowing the webmaster to propose a specific stylesheet for their recommended UI/UX. Removing the semantics is not gonna help empower clients, except when it comes to plaintext content. So, adding a new content-type over HTTP? Sure. Just throw in some CommonMark: it's well-specified and more or less complete (depending on your use-case). Adding a simpler protocol for delivering content? Why not, but it's not that easy to future-proof: HTTP is arguably more complex, but has some interesting properties such as content-type/encoding negociation or decoupling from transport security (for .onion/.i2p/DANE or any other future technology).
Just to be clear i like gemini very much and i've been wanting to support gemlog to my blog for a while. I just think there's room for some other technical foundations to explore the political promises of gemini.
If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast.
Yes, I can use NoScript, uBlock Origin with comprehensive lists, etc. and start to approach that level of simplicity... but every other link I click will likely be broken in weird and wonderful ways. In Gemini, they all work (provided the page still exists, of course). I think there's some value in that.
With a `text/gemini` content type over HTTP/1.1 you could just use cURL, wget or fancier stuff like w3m/lynx and get the exact same benefits but would not need to install yet another internet facing tool that may even get things wrong security wise (even with simple stuff a possibility).
And given that HTTP has content negotiation, how could you ever be assured that a given link goes to a text/gemini page?
There will come a point- and for some things we're already past it- where there is exactly one viable web browser, and it is controlled by a company that sells ads. This is why Gemini exists.
Even lack of styling with every page looking about the same can be considered a feature, everything looks familiar and we aren't inconvenienced by bad design decisions.
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/
(Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
You create a set of conventions that “Gemini compatible” websites conform to. This will allow your site to work with small Gemini-only browsers. Those conventions mostly amount to sending markdown for URLs when the user agent sends “accept: application/x-Gemini-markdown” (or whatever the mime type would be). Web servers send the markdown to Gemini user agents while they send normal html to browsers that don’t send the Accept header.
To signify that the site is a “Gemini site” at the URL level you can create a convention that the url must end in “.gemini” e.g. https://foo.com/blog.gemini
> (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
I don’t see how sending a different file based on an accept header is any more technically unrealistic than creating an entirely new technology stack.
What Gemini got right is that simplifying and limiting the publishing format prevents bloat.
Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link.
A key feature of Gemini browsers is to visually distinguish between links to Gemini:// URLs and links to HTTP:// URLs.
It’s barely complex. It’s a standard dispatch on the accept header, all major web servers handle this out of the box. Also it has the significant benefit of working with existing browsers. On what basis were you making that statement?
> Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link.
You can accomplish the same URL transparency by using a file extension convention. E.g. “https://foo.com/my log.gemini”
> You can accomplish the same URL transparency by using a file extension convention. E.g. “https://foo.com/my log.gemini”
The extension shouldn't be `.gemini` it should be `.this-is-not-malware-i-super-pinky-promise`
Just kidding. The problem is you can't enforce a mere "convention" against malicious actors.
The subset of http necessary to support Gemini-style requests is really not complex at all. I’ve written basic http servers in hours if not minutes.
> The extension shouldn't be `.gemini` it should be `.this-is-not-malware-i-super-pinky-promise`
If you are someone who uses what I’m calling “http-Gemini” because they are worried about malware then use the stripped down “http Gemini” browser. For the rest of the world who is already comfortable with potential malware in their links, there is no change. The control stays in the user’s hands.