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Gemini is Solutionism

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Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#191

Post by cxr »

akkartik wrote: post #188
cxr wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#192

Post by ygpa »

barakm wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#193

Post by ygpa »

ratorx wrote: post #181
progval wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 implem…

There are a couple of search engines in Gemini already, as the server software can do as much computing as it wants before serving a page.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#194

Post by krapp »

boring_twenties wrote: post #169
akagusu wrote: post #132

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 Gem…

Tech companies will straight up ban you for unspecified reasons determined by some algorithm no one understands, with no recourse. It doesn't get any more "exclusionary" than that.

"tech companies" are not a protocol, nor are they a network built on that protocol, so the comparison here is specious at best. HTTP doesn't ban anyone, nor does TCP/IP nor does HTML, the internet or the web.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#195

Post by csb6 »

boring_twenties wrote: post #169
akagusu wrote: post #132

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 Gem…

Tech companies will straight up ban you for unspecified reasons determined by some algorithm no one understands, with no recourse. It doesn't get any more "exclusionary" than that.

What does that have to do with the http protocol?

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#196

Post by sreevisakh »

grumbel wrote: post #156
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…

> 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.

The problem that people have with ads on the web is cross-site tracking and targeted ads. Gemini protocol does indeed prevent that by restricting one request to just one response. Non targeted ads wouldn't be a privacy concern, or even an attractive option.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#197

Post by dopidopHN »

gkbrk wrote: post #123
dopidopHN wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spec of Gemini state that a Gemini web client should be writable as a weekend project for a experienced dev.

Very impressive that people can write TLS clients in a weekend, on top of building Gemini clients and Gemtext parsers.

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.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#198

Post by DarylZero »

viraptor wrote: post #54
throwawayboise wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Gemini can play videos just fine already.

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#199

Post by hammyhavoc »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #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 huma…

Source? Or is this anecdotal?

Re: Gemini is Solutionism

#200

Post by hammyhavoc »

captn3m0 wrote: post #33
KerrAvon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which variant of Markdown would that implement? Would it allow embedded HTML (for tables and such) as the original Markdown implementation did?

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 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…

Would love to see this happen.
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