Gemini does not aim to replace HTTP, I don't understand why this article is talking about it like it is?
Gemini is Solutionism
81–90 of 227 posts
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#82Having a new protocol has value for the same reason HAM does. You hope that the character of the content itself will be interesting enough to be it's own subculture. Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture. It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I fee…
I'd start by checking out Antenna:
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/
It's an aggregator of sorts, but with a bit of a twist.
Clients, for the terminal I recommend Amfora
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
and Lagrange is a great GUI client
https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: '. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky.
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#83I 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…
> 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…
"Bikeshedding about internet protocols" doesn't mean bikeshedding the gemini protocol specifically. The Gemini protocol is stable, I'm sure, but what I mean is that people are more interested in discussing the tech especially vs http or whatever.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#84Any cool places to hang out on Gemini? I've got a client for it and poked around a bit
Start on Antenna:
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#85Earlier 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. 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 would be nice to use a platform without actively working to fight the intentions of the pages you visit.
You can do that without making intentions verboten altogether. I'm happy to see someone's weirdly styled homepage or tumblr blog, and Gemini strips too much away for it to be worth it.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#86Earlier 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.
I think abut it kind of like this (as someone who has never used Gemini):
There are all sorts of uses for cryptographic proofs; e.g. you can sign a document and prove that you were the one who signed it, or you can do a bunch of double-SHA hashes and prove ownership of a Bitcoin, you can prove via a SSL certificate that the content that claims to come from somedomain.example actually does, etc etc.
But there's no way, via currently existing protocols, to deliver a document with a proof that the document does not contain code designed to track the user or that the document will display properly without running arbitrary scripts.
Gemini is bikeshedding, yes. But it solves this social problem - a problem of expectations. You can't make a webpage with tracking scripts and deliver it over Gemeni because there's no point. No one who received the document would actually execute any of the scripts. So Gemini succeeds at creating a little insular community where tracking and web analytics are not just forbidden, but impossible.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#87Indeed, one could at least argue that gopher was a simpler protocol, gemini makes short work of that, too, and leaves it to be only an incompatible and less capable https protocol with some other convention for the markup.
I entirely agree that there's no good reason not to use HTTP[s] as a transport for textual information, which is kinda what it's made to do anyway.. I'd argue against a gemini content-type, I'd get as far away from the association with gemini as possible.
text/feather is a better content-type, it makes it clear that it's text, with a feather-light structure imposed on it.. That structure should probably be very little more than support for line breaks and hyperlinks.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#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 users can't even log in or post anything. It is why we have to use browsers that are more complex than entire operating systems just to support everything that can be done over HTTP. It led us to monopolies on web browsing - how many pages of web standards you have to implement and comply with if you want to make your own browser, just to visit google dot com? And at any time and moment all your efforts can be interrupted by security researchers who would tell you that your browser is insecure and now you have to comply with hundreds of pages of security standards as well, all because of how much can be done over HTTP. You can't even host a simple website over just HTTP without somebody telling you that you have to use HTTPS, even if you don't need it, because why not? You'll have the green icon!
And because of such monopolies, most websites also turned into "shells" that try to ruin your experience as much as possible so you go and download their app where they have more control without being restricted by browsers. And this, in turn, led most people going off the general web and staying inside their apps.
Sure, you can make your app that throws away most of HTTP-based bloat, but then someone forks and makes it support some of the bloat because they like it that way, and then someone else adds a bit more, and we are back at it again. You can't just "go back" and strip everything from HTTP, entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history, because there is no other road history of HTTP can walk by.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#89What 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
dominance that intentionally cripples
web experience for greater user control, but author tries to compare it
with familiar web sub-formats that are
characteristics of content: Gemini
isn't about content, its a form of
interaction that prescribes certain
limits that Internet Amish will feel
comfortable with, without introducing
too much overhead(like Tor and I2P).
Re: Gemini is Solutionism
#90I went down the Gemini rabbit hole last week (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/17/0800, and even coded my own minimalist server for it) and tend to agree that both its protocol and markup are oversimplified technical solutions in search of a problem, although I wouldn’t cast it so harshly.
It does feel like escapism/subculture of sorts, and I do believe that retreat from the Web is one of the underlying motivations, but (maintaining a relatively minimalist Markdown-backed site myself) I agree that there are no real technical reasons for it to exist (even Markdown support is something that is relatively easy to agree upon across browsers).
What I do like about it is the Lagrange browser, and the extremely legible reading experience—-I consume most of my content via RSS feeds and Reader Mode on websites I visit frequently, and I like the uniformity and predictability of the layout, as well as the lack of ads and distractions.
I’d be happy enough if Lagrange’s unfettered visual style became a sort of “forced Reader mode” in standard browsers…