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Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

gemini.circumlunar.space

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Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#41

Post by spc476 »

astrobe_ wrote: post #38
sloum wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you, from having been involved in a number of the discussions on the mailing list, that these points were definitely discussed. There were a number of people on your side. HTML subsets were discussed, as was using markdown (or a markdown subset). In the end a simple link syntax was chosen along with a few optional items. The simple link syntax is much more than a stripped down html 1.0... it is gopher but…

Did someone also pointed out that CRLF is a pointless Microsoftian archaism? There's no need anymore to use two characters to mark the end of a line.

Yes, several times. It was kept in because other text based protocols (like SMTP, HTTP) also specify the use of CRLF, at least for the request.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#42

Post by mattkevan »

After recently discovering Gopher and falling down a deep (gopher)hole of exploration, I’m convinced that it, or something similar is a great alternative to the commercial web. What a volunteer-run co-op which sells food in bulk bins is to Walmart.

Simple, fast and open. The exact opposite to something like Urbit, which while it might be open source is designed to be as closed as possible.

Incidentally I recently found a good Gopher client for iOS has some rough edges but is definitely one of the most usable clients.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/gopher-client/id1235310088

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#43

Post by pianoben »

GuiA wrote: post #40
pianoben wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd encourage you to actually attend a synagogue service, or even just have a chat with a real-life Jewish person, before exposing yourself to ridicule as you have here. In my life as a Jewish person, I've never _once_ hear a rabbi even hint as such a sentiment. Converts are treated exactly as Jewish as those who are born into the faith. What leads you to think otherwise?

Most every religion does have that bias of "we know better, we've got the holy texts, if you're not with us you're doomed/clueless/need to be saved/unlucky". The fact that modern practitioners in your geographic locale of choice aren't as bigoted as their more literal brethren doesn't mean much, except perhaps that there is hope in undoing the more harmful superstitiousness of religion by raising quality of living (f…

Sure, but that's not what the GP was talking about. They directly stated that those who joined would forever be "second-class citizens", which simply isn't factual.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#44

Post by kiwidrew »

Very cool, this is essentially just an updated (modernised) Gopher protocol.

I wish the protocol was designed so that the server signed the document itself [well, most likely a hash of the document]. That would allow caches, archives, and proxies to prove that a document did in fact come from the claimed origin.

Unfortunately the Gemini protocol uses TLS, and so only offers the standard guarantee of HTTPS: a client can confirm it is communicating with the origin server, but it is unable to transfer that guarantee to anyone else.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#45

Post by astrobe_ »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #8

I see that they've specified both a transport protocol, to replace HTTPS, and a document format, to replace HTML. BLUF: They should have just run the text/gemini format on top of HTTPS 1.1, make a gemini --> HTML formatter, and maybe a restricted subset of HTTPS, and called it a day. Replacing HTTPS is a waste of time. Also, most of the benefits of the document format could be gotten with a sane subset of HTML. There…

> But if you _do_ reuse connections, or use something like QUIC, then you can get better performance

I don't have opinions about the rest, but this is a good point.

With text-only I think one could easily slurp a whole Gemini site in one go. Although it could complicate the spec, specifying a way to download the whole site as a compressed archive could be nice. Clients could then offer an offline mode and it could help with mirroring sites.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#46

Post by gladskdks »

azinman2 wrote: post #36
sloum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the gopher community is very split on this concept with many people doing just that, but many others (myself included) wishing that gopher/web proxies and cross posting did not exist at all.

Is there much (any) gopher community left?

There are some. It's had something of a resurgence in the last couple of years and a few new gopherholes have opened up.

You can peruse gopherspace via the overbite gateway, and the big gopher search engine, Veronica, is still up and running.

Take a look! :)

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#47

Post by stryan »

azinman2 wrote: post #36
sloum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the gopher community is very split on this concept with many people doing just that, but many others (myself included) wishing that gopher/web proxies and cross posting did not exist at all.

Is there much (any) gopher community left?

SDF[1] and many of the various tilde PUBNIX's both have gopher communities, and if you're on the fediverse (mastodon/plemora/etc) you'll find people listing gopherholes in the profile

[1] sdf.org

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#50

Post by x3blah »

colinplamondon wrote: post #13

This is so intensely cool. Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW. This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW. It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW. Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine…

"Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space."

Excerpt below is from the file /scripts/web included with the original netcat in 1995.

   #! /bin/sh
   ## The web sucks.  It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand
   ## tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line
   ## clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run
   ## *commerce* over the damn thing.  Ye godz.  Welcome to TV of the next
   ## century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and
   ## about as much security as today's cable industry!
   ##
   ## Having grown mightily tired of pain in the ass browsers, I decided
   ## to build the minimalist client.  It doesn't handle POST, just GETs, but
   ## the majority of cgi forms handlers apparently ignore the method anyway.
   ## A distinct advantage is that it *doesn't* pass on any other information
   ## to the server, like Referer: or info about your local machine such as
   ## Netscum tries to!
   ##
   ## Since the first version, this has become the *almost*-minimalist client,
   ## but it saves a lot of typing now.  And with netcat as its backend, it's
   ## totally the balls.  Don't have netcat?  Get it here in /src/hacks!
   ## _H* 950824, updated 951009 et seq.
   ##
FWIW, I still use original nc and similar TCP clients to "interact" with the www. Works great.

Not fan of SSL, now TLS, which was in fact created to facilitate commercial use of the www, or "e-commerce", in 1990's.

As an ongoing experiment in a different protocol/space, I run CurveCP on home LAN.

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