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Gemini is Solutionism

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Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#131

Post by southerntofu »

flohofwoe wrote: post #125
foxfluff wrote: post #114

> 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, before this one collapses. The implication being that the web can be changed? I don't believe that, I believe the web is broken and it's only getting worse by the day. I'm not going to discourage you from tr…

Disclaimer: I haven't (consciously) heard of this Gemini thing before, but: > I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, ... I guarantee this will only be true until it becomes popular enough to be a juicy target for the more - uhm - "business-oriented" people, it's not because of a restricted feature set. Creating a technology which is intentionally uninteresting to business is an interesting angle of course which I…

Now tell the business people you can't display images and can't tell apart bots from "real people" on Gemini. They'll much prefer to keep their ads on the web. Being uninteresting to business is indeed a feature not a bug, but i agree with much of the author's criticism of gemini reinventing a square wheel: it's fun but a modern web subset would probably be easier to learn for many people while keeping backwards-compat with the rest of the world.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#132

Post by akagusu »

I think people just want something to rant about.

Gemini folks maintain Gemini for themselves using their own hardware and their own time, so I think they can do whatever they think its best for them.

If they want to strip HTTP and remove all cool features it has, it's their problem, not ours.

If they want to treat content as text only, again, it's their problem, not ours.

If they want to publish their content as Gemini only, it's their content, not ours.

If they want to bikeshedding about internet protocols, it's their time, not ours.

Now, about Gemini folks being elitists and intentionally excluding people with their protocol, take a minute to think about what tech companies are doing.

Tech companies and many other companies that rely heavily on tech are making our society dependent more and more on online services, selling all kind of products and services that need an internet connection to work, even for basic features.

In a world where half of population does not have internet connection, and geek folks feel excluded by a protocol just because they don't like it, how can we name what tech companies are doing, if it is not elitism and exclusion?

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#133

Post by southerntofu »

tpoacher wrote: post #128
square_usual wrote: post #50

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 i…

> is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content? 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 yo…

> 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).

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#134

Post by southerntofu »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #74
knowledge-clay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 2…

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#135

Post by southerntofu »

agumonkey wrote: post #63
duxup wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, may…

It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge I do miss these days too.

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#136

Post by nurb »

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #122

This post made me pretty interested in gemini. Since there are apparently a few users here: What server would you recommend to get started? Any small tutorials on setting up a gemini site? Any links to gemini sites (maybe your own) you want to share?

There is a few gemini links on awesome-genini list.

I haven't tried them out, but usually, awesome-* lists are good starting points.

https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#137

Post by foxfluff »

square_usual wrote: post #26
brimble wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#138

Post by agumonkey »

southerntofu wrote: post #135
agumonkey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge I do miss these days too.

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 indoctr…

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#139

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

nurb wrote: post #136
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #122

This post made me pretty interested in gemini. Since there are apparently a few users here: What server would you recommend to get started? Any small tutorials on setting up a gemini site? Any links to gemini sites (maybe your own) you want to share?

There is a few gemini links on awesome-genini list. I haven't tried them out, but usually, awesome-* lists are good starting points. https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services

Thanks!

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#140

Post by piaste »

dexwiz wrote: post #80

I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.

> a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type

What browser are you using? Mine (Vivaldi) displays the domain as its standard Punycode ASCII representation:

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com

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