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Six Years of Gemini

geminiprotocol.net

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Re: Six Years of Gemini

#101

Post by uamgeoalsk »

rglullis wrote: post #57
_Algernon_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet and web existed for a long time before everything became infested with advertisement: Hobbyist bulletin boards, Wikipedia, the blogosphere, etc. These had enough content that a single person couldn't consume it all in a lifetime.

That internet was also only interesting and valuable to a fraction of the people who use it today. And if you don't care about that and you are thinking from what you might get out of it: an internet where 99% of the content is crap but universal will end up with more valuable content than a neutered internet that can prevent the emergence of crap, but is tailored to appeal only to 1% of the people. IOW, no one cares…

A movie theater where 99% of the movies are crap but universal is less interesting to me than a well curated cinematheque.

What I'm wondering is why do you feel the need to dismiss people's niche interests like this? You've even been rude about it in other answers, calling it "masturbatory".

Not everything has to be for everyone. Not everything has to be for you.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#102

Post by gcarvalho »

rollcat wrote: post #75
vascocosta wrote: post #63

As an early adopter and developer of a couple of service oriented capsules, as time went by my interest faded completely. I'm a strong advocate of live and let live, so this is not a critique or discouragement post, but rather my own perspective. Like many have mentioned already, I personally would have preferred pure markdown and no gemtext at all. Similarly, and although I understand the reasoning behind making enc…

> Again, I get it, but I can live with visiting only the websites or gopherholes I want. [...] Even if we consider just the minimalist and well designed websites, this means hoards of content when compared to all gemini capsules. I agree. Personally, I'm a fan of progressive enhancement. E.g. I use this Hugo partial to hide emails; it de-obfuscates an address using JavaScript, and falls back to printing a shell comma…

I can attest that CSS is very effective for obfuscating e-mail. I displayed my academic e-mail on my webpage for over half a decade using CSS to flip the text direction[1] without getting significant spam.

[1] https://superuser.com/a/235965

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#103

Post by rglullis »

Gormo wrote: post #94
sneak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. You could have tinyweb/oldweb sites identify themselves with a meta tag, and have a browser that only browses those. A opt-in, web-within-a-web. And turns off js, cookies, and images. You don’t need another transport protocol.

How do you stop users who aren't using the custom browser from accessing these 'tinyweb' HTTP sites? How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you suppress direct incorporation of 'mainstream' web content into 'tinyweb' content? If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web, and you're already going to have to develop cus…

> How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them?

How do you that with Gemini?

> If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web

There is no way you can have an air gapped network with public access. The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#104

Post by SoftTalker »

Gormo wrote: post #84
hombre_fatal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though there are any number of nonstandard things you can do over HTTP to restrict your community from the unwashed eternal september noobs from joining it. Requiring a markdown content-type would probably even be enough. Consider the fact that TFA is already proxied over HTTP just so more than 3 people will read it, so it seems more sane to be HTTP native.

> Though there are any number of nonstandard things you can do over HTTP to restrict your community from the unwashed eternal september noobs from joining it. But why would you bother with that, when your whole goal is to create an ecosystem that's separate from the web in the first place? > Consider the fact that TFA is already proxied over HTTP just so more than 3 people will read it. Seems more sane to be HTTP nat…

> Podcasts are often rehosted on YouTube

I actually don't know of any other way to get them. I suspect I'm not alone. That's how pervasive the dominant platforms are.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#105

Post by jug »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #74
vascocosta wrote: post #63

As an early adopter and developer of a couple of service oriented capsules, as time went by my interest faded completely. I'm a strong advocate of live and let live, so this is not a critique or discouragement post, but rather my own perspective. Like many have mentioned already, I personally would have preferred pure markdown and no gemtext at all. Similarly, and although I understand the reasoning behind making enc…

The thing I liked about Gemini and its self-imposed limitations is that it was very much impossible to create a misbehaving Gemini document. There is no way a Gemini browser will phone home, run malicious code on my side, grab/upload my browser history or send sensor or other data because I forgot to turn off various options, etc. To me the entire thing was much more trustworthy. You can of course recreate this exper…

This should really be a more common feature in web browsers. Yes, it can be achieved by turning off JavaScript and so on but it should be a feature like Incognito mode where you have either a high visibility toggle button, or open tabs in this mode, where tabs with the same kind as the parent keeps being opened in this mode. That way, you’d have Gemini for the regular web just by making websites that don’t break when that kind of code is disabled.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#106

Post by floren »

The thing about Gemini is that it reads like someone who thinks Gopher sounds neat but has only ever dealt with HTTP and HTML/Markdown... so they took HTTP GET, chopped a digit off the response codes, and called it a new protocol, then tacked on an intentionally-broken Markdown implementation (more broken than the original Markdown, I mean).

Interesting note: the first line of a Gemini response is a MIME type. It's usually `text/gemini` but there's no reason it can't be `text/html`, `application/javascript`, or anything else. A while back I did a little poking in some Gemini server code and made it do precisely that: serve HTML files which I accessed via elinks. Of course once you're serving HTML over Gemini you might ask, exactly what advantage am I getting by putting it over a purposefully-broken subset of HTTP, and I would say that's a damn good question.

In 2024 I wrote 'The modern Web and all its crappiness didn't come about because there's something inherently wicked in HTML and HTTP, it came about because people built things on top of the basic foundation, extending (sometimes poorly) and expanding. The more people play with Gemini, the more they'll want to "extend" it... and the closer they'll bring it to HTTP, because it follows the exact same fundamental model once you strip off the extraneous document format specification' and I stand by it.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#107

Post by rglullis »

Gormo wrote: post #99
rglullis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse! This makes the whole proposal even more misguided. Different ecosystems only make sense when we have distinct populations that might be as well considered different species.

There's no 'proposal' here -- this is a review of an active ecosystem that has already had its ideas implemented and iterated on for the past six years. Having a different ecosystem is the exact intention of this project. If that's not for you, you're certainly not required to participate, but the world is a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global m…

> a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global mean.

But they are all sharing the same world. It's all the same ecosystem.

My objection is not because I am against people trying to do something different. My objection is to this delusional idea that this work needs to be isolated from everyone else. It's sterile at best and elitist at worst.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#108

Post by rainingmonkey »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #47
treve wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limits of the medium and the creativity this enforces is why people like it. It caters a niche audience with a shared set of values. I get why people don't really care for it personally or on a technical level (myself included), but it always surprises me that it's hard for people to understand that others do.

I agree the limitations are what makes the platform great, but I really wish they had included a simple image block in the spec. Text only is just a little to limiting if you ask me.

Many browsers will render a link to an image as an embedded image block!

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#109

Post by Gormo »

rglullis wrote: post #103
Gormo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you stop users who aren't using the custom browser from accessing these 'tinyweb' HTTP sites? How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you suppress direct incorporation of 'mainstream' web content into 'tinyweb' content? If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web, and you're already going to have to develop cus…

> How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you that with Gemini? > If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web There is no way you can have an air gapped network with public access. The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between…

> How do you that with Gemini?

You keep it isolated from the ecosystem in which all of those things are taking place.

> The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET.

The whole point is to minimize the chance of that happening -- by limiting mainstream appeal, keeping it a niche, and avoiding Eternal September -- and to maximize the friction of bridging these two ecosystems. And so far, they've done a fairly good job of it, since Gemini has been expanding for six years without any indication of any of this starting to happen.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#110

Post by rglullis »

Gormo wrote: post #109
rglullis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you that with Gemini? > If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web There is no way you can have an air gapped network with public access. The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between…

> How do you that with Gemini? You keep it isolated from the ecosystem in which all of those things are taking place. > The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET. The whole point is to minimize the chance of that happening -- by limiting mainstream appeal, keeping it a nic…

> and to maximize the friction of bridging these two ecosystems.

There is no friction. It's trivial to write a program that can scrape a Gemini network.

If there is no one pulling data from Gemini servers yet, is not because it's difficult do it, but merely because it's still too small to be relevant.

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