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Gemini is Solutionism
11–20 of 227 posts
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#12You’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.
> It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism.
> 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?
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#13Having 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?
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#14You’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.
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.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#15I 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. Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.
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.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#16Super pedantic but you don't need to send the Host header either to get a response. I use the telnet trick often as debug step number one.
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. (1) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4
> That’s the bare minimum that this server accepts in order for me to request the website from it.
The example shown returns a 400 for me without a Host header.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. (1) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4
> That’s the bare minimum that this server accepts in order for me to request the website from it. The example shown returns a 400 for me without a Host header.
Exactly. Without a Host header, 400. With a Host header, 301 to https.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#18> 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.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#19No post body was provided.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#20I 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. Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.
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.