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Gemini is Solutionism

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Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#151

Post by krapp »

akkartik wrote: post #23

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. Sure…

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#152

Post by _heimdall »

robalni wrote: post #129

> The question here shouldn’t be why not to use a subset of HTTP and HTML, but rather, why not build on top of HTTP with a different markup layer other than HTML. We have APIs using HTTP with JSON instead of HTML, for example. As you can read in the Gemini FAQ, the reason that Gemini is not compatible with HTTP is that it should be possible to know that when you browse Gemini content, you will stay in gemini content.…

Is there actually a good way for Gemini as a protocol to make linking to an HTTP site harder? I don't think the protocol actually limits the type of link on a Gemini page, and if I click on an HTTP link in an app my OS will just pop it up in a web browser without a problem. Yes I'd know the app changed, but I'm not sure that would really help guard me from following a link to the current web

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#154

Post by duxup »

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…

People can still make websites. I don’t think capitalism is to blame here.

And Gemini in this case is happy to achieve the same result.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#155

Post by _heimdall »

bawolff wrote: post #110

Gemini is so silly. The logic is basically as follows: - people are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular. - instead lets make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. But people have to voluntarily use our system. For some reason people will use gemini voluntarily even though they refused to voluntarily use the web in a way we approve…

I went down the Gemini rabbit hole 6 or 8 months ago and didn't really understand the solution it offered, but you're really missing the point here.

The idea isn't that consumers are using the web in a way that is disliked. The web is run by and for large corporations legally bound to do what is best for shareholders. The web allows those corporations to take advantage of consumers in ways that the average user doesn't understand and often wouldn't knowingly consent to, and in the process opens the door to entire classes of vulnerabilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Gemini may include a few unpopular assumptions and limitations, but a consumer never has to worry about any content on Gemini being vulnerable to script injections, malicious spyware, or site silently mining crypto on your hardware. Tracking is still technically possible, as mentioned in the OP article, but in a very limited sense and only really at the level of page requests.

Gemini may be an over correction, but it at least starts (or continues) the conversation of whether a limited feature set is the most effective way to fix so many of the problems on the web today.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#156

Post by grumbel »

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…

> I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads

That seems more like an artifact of it not being popular than a feature of the protocol. If companies wanted to, they could just run native advertisement on Gemini just like they do elsewhere, just disguise the ad as regular news article and call it a day. Nothing stops them from putting banners on top of every page either or how about showing you an ad text before you are allowed to visit the actual content? You could even have a server-side wait time before you are allowed to move on from the ad.

Gemini just feels like rolling back the Web to an earlier stage without actually adding anything meaningful. If it ever got popular, it would devolve just the same as the Web already did, as it's nothing more than the same thing with a different paint job.

My personal take on this is that the core of everything wrong with the Web is the request–response nature of the protocol, as that allows to do a lot of crooked stuff on the server side, either intentionally (e.g. monitoring user activity, showing different content to different people) or unintentionally (e.g. causing broken links by servers going down). If the client gets plain-text or HTML really doesn't make a difference.

Another big issue is that publishing on the Web is far too complicated and expensive, which is why nobody is doing it anymore and instead relies on Facebook, Youtube and Co.

Something like IPFS feels like a much more valuable attempt as fixing the Web, as IPFS gets away from the request-response and turns the Web into a persistent data structure, that can't just be meddled with at the server side. It also makes publish substantially easier, as hosting is no longer tied to any single company, multiple people can host the same content and you don't have to pay and maintain a DNS record.

The part that is still missing with IPFS is a better replacement HTML. Stuff like pagination, image galleries, shopping carts, comments, etc. really need to become part of HTML, instead of stuff people hack together with Javascript or server side scripts. And how come we don't have an tag yet?

Efforts in simplification should really happen on the users side, not in the protocol.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#157

Post by grumbel »

dvt wrote: post #28

> The modern web sucks 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 perspecti…

> 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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#159

Post by cxr »

akkartik wrote: post #23

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. Sure…

> 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.

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>

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#160

Post by notriddle »

sertraline wrote: post #88

>it certainly does not justify completely replacing existing infrastructure and standards that humans have mutually agreed upon. It does, it makes sense. These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web, it led us to corporate controlled Internet where few major websites aggregate 80% of the content. It led us to scroll-jacking, bot-driven, located behind firewalls and captchas websites where genuine…

> These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web

That’s the entire contention, though. I don’t think the standards really had anything to do with it.

The only thing that even comes close is maybe DNS, since it ties web pages to specific organizations, so a page only continues to exist as long as an unbroken chain of custody keeps it there. But Gemini doesn’t even address that (ask IPFS and FreeNet how it’s going).

But mostly, browser vendors created the standards. And most of the current browser vendors became dominant browser vendors by using some other business to gain an edge in the market: Google used their ad business, sure, but before them it was Microsoft using their operating system to push their browser on people, and they largely just ignored the standards.

> entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history

But does Gemini actually do that? What stops your client from making ad-hoc extensions to gemtext?

No amount of writing, or lack thereof, can stop evil Gemini browser vendors from just ignoring what the text says. You need something else to make sure that power players don’t just ignore the rules you set out.

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