201–210 of 227 posts
What author hints at is a view of Gemini community as ideologically monolithic Internet Amish, refusing technology and standards because they're opposed to modern state of things: the opposing(author) view is monoculture of Hypertext Web subjugating all protocols will eventually dominate due user-friendly and flexible nature of web stacks. Its obvious Gemini isn't a tech solution but a rebellion against corporate web…
Why a new protocol? Because modern browsers are massive, and we need something much, much lighter that doesn't need to support HTML and such.
You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.
Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link.
A key feature of Gemini browsers is to visually distinguish between links to Gemini:// URLs and links to HTTP:// URLs.
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…
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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…
Wild tomatoes are red, tiny, and barely useful as food. The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.
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You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.
That's a massively more complex implementation for no benefit. Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link. A key feature of Gemini browsers is to visually distinguish between links to Gemini:// URLs and links to HTTP:// URLs.
It’s barely complex. It’s a standard dispatch on the accept header, all major web servers handle this out of the box. Also it has the significant benefit of working with existing browsers. On what basis were you making that statement?
> Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link.
You can accomplish the same URL transparency by using a file extension convention. E.g. “https://foo.com/my log.gemini”
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It wouldn’t be incompatible if it took advantage of the Accept header.
It pretty much would. You couldn't link to the HTTP-Markdown-Web from the HTTP-HTML-Web (normal browsers don't and won't support Markdown) and you couldn't link to the HTTP-HTML-Web from the HTTP-Markdown-Web (the Markdown browser doesn't and won't support HTML) (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML i…
You create a set of conventions that “Gemini compatible” websites conform to. This will allow your site to work with small Gemini-only browsers. Those conventions mostly amount to sending markdown for URLs when the user agent sends “accept: application/x-Gemini-markdown” (or whatever the mime type would be). Web servers send the markdown to Gemini user agents while they send normal html to browsers that don’t send the Accept header.
To signify that the site is a “Gemini site” at the URL level you can create a convention that the url must end in “.gemini” e.g. https://foo.com/blog.gemini
> (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
I don’t see how sending a different file based on an accept header is any more technically unrealistic than creating an entirely new technology stack.
> 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…
I wish best of luck for ads to be serve and viewed at scale in there
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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-comp…
100% not true. They will simply pay less per impression for their ascii art ads.
Browsers are a natural monopoly. The reason is scale. Modern browsers are just too fucking big. Bob from Seattle isn't taking down Google with his neato "classic browsing experience". Nobody uses Bob's browser.
So how do you rid the web of its surveillance scripts, telemetry-filled browsers, bad UX decisions, unnecessary bloat, manipulative algorithms and lowest-common-denominator pandering? Well, Gemini says you don't. This is where people get red in the face. How could you possibly give up the good fight!? Just visit websites that aren't trash! Well, sure. I do visit blogs that treat me well, but there's a reason most of the web is garbage. Because garbage makes money. Individual consumer decisions make up an aggregate of consumption behavior that shifts the market towards certain development patterns. "Surveillance capitalism" could also be called "you get unlimited entertainment for free, and in exchange I keep the receipts" capitalism. That's a pretty good deal for most people. And that's why the business model keeps getting copied. It's scalable, popular, practical, and yields the highest number of consumers of your product. It would literally be irrational for a business NOT to do this. When you block 30 trackers on someone's recipe page, you're taking a square peg and trying to force it into a round hole. That isn't a recipe page, but a tracking page that happens to have a recipe on it. Making it "work" is contrary to its intended purpose.
So Gemini basically asks the question "what if we made a protocol that is architecturally predisposed to being user-friendly?" Gemini is a thought experiment in making a tool that's for a particular thing, for a particular group of likeminded people. What if instead of accepting dependancy on a browser duopoly, the protocol allowed anyone to hack up a browser in an afternoon? What if the protocol was designed to make surveillance capitalism an impossible business model? What if instead of trying to turn the corporate web into FOSSweb and bringing everyone into web utopia, developers created their own web that caters to user-friendly experiences for the niche minority of people who actually care about all that high-minded moralizing?
So is Gemini useless? Maybe for you. But I found interesting blogs and I use the Lagrange client, which is very pretty. I enjoy reading peoples' thoughts on philosophy, economics, science, environmentalism, all kinds of things. And for the first time in decades, I feel like I'm actually surfing the web again, as I browse feed aggregators and click on random links, digging through post after post on all kinds of cool things. And it feels like a relaxing break from having to worry about what scripts may be on the sites I browse. I just click and go.
Will Gemini show me 4k videos of puppies being carried around in strollers at the park? No. Gemini will never fill that part of my browsing habits. But does it have to? Consumers have become so domesticated in their mindset that one tool has to do it all. Once the tool turns out to work against you, you find yourself choosing between living in modern society or becoming a hermit. There is value in letting a hammer just be a hammer, and not trying to tape a saw on top of it.
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That's a massively more complex implementation for no benefit. Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content can be expressed in the URL of a link. A key feature of Gemini browsers is to visually distinguish between links to Gemini:// URLs and links to HTTP:// URLs.
> That's a massively more complex implementation for no benefit. It’s barely complex. It’s a standard dispatch on the accept header, all major web servers handle this out of the box. Also it has the significant benefit of working with existing browsers. On what basis were you making that statement? > Also it's definitely not enough to set a HTTP header. Need to use a different schema so that the restraints on content…
> You can accomplish the same URL transparency by using a file extension convention. E.g. “https://foo.com/my log.gemini”
The extension shouldn't be `.gemini` it should be `.this-is-not-malware-i-super-pinky-promise`
Just kidding. The problem is you can't enforce a mere "convention" against malicious actors.