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Six Years of Gemini

geminiprotocol.net

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Re: Six Years of Gemini

#91

Post by vascocosta »

rollcat wrote: post #75
vascocosta wrote: post #63

As an early adopter and developer of a couple of service oriented capsules, as time went by my interest faded completely. I'm a strong advocate of live and let live, so this is not a critique or discouragement post, but rather my own perspective. Like many have mentioned already, I personally would have preferred pure markdown and no gemtext at all. Similarly, and although I understand the reasoning behind making enc…

> Again, I get it, but I can live with visiting only the websites or gopherholes I want. [...] Even if we consider just the minimalist and well designed websites, this means hoards of content when compared to all gemini capsules. I agree. Personally, I'm a fan of progressive enhancement. E.g. I use this Hugo partial to hide emails; it de-obfuscates an address using JavaScript, and falls back to printing a shell comma…

This kind of approach is exactly why I believe we can have a nice experience over HTTP. Progressive content enhancement nails the perfect balance between too simple and too bloated. I personally believe client side scripting is important and ideally should be used sparingly. Your example illustrates a perfectly reasonable use case where JavaScript makes sense, yet still providing a scriptless alternative that solves the problem. Nice stuff.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#92

Post by kstrauser »

dimkr1 wrote: post #40
tvshtr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's this federated with anything?

https://github.com/dimkr/tootik is another Gemini social network that does federate over ActivityPub, and I've been thinking about developing a minimalist ActivityPub alternative (maybe using Gemini and Titan to replace HTTP GET and POST, respectively) that can coexist with ActivityPub support

That’s brilliant, and exactly the sort of thing that could get me back into Gemini. Nice!

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#93

Post by rglullis »

bayindirh wrote: post #81
rglullis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, I switched to Mastodon (...) and was able to see real forms of people I followed before, so I have updated my views on them. Isn't that strong evidence that it is possible to have a "human-scale" web built on HTTP, and consequently that there is not much benefit in restricting yourself to a protocol that is designed to be limited? > Personally, I see Gemini or other protocols as equals to HTTP/S Except…

Yes, but it's important to understand that limitations are moved to Mastodon "layer" in that case. It takes careful deliberation and restraint to keep something tidy. Mastodon does this by limiting its scope and organizational structure. We as humans like to abuse capabilities. So, to keep something tidy and prevent (or realistically slow down) rot, you need a limit somewhere. Putting that limit to humans vs. the pro…

> it's important to understand that limitations are moved to Mastodon "layer" in that case.

Mastodon may be my preferred social network nowadays, but it's despite the prevalent philosophy from the development team. It's also arguably the reason that the Fediverse can not manage to grow to more than 1 million MAU.

>Because power corrupts and gets abused

The solution to this is not to get rid of power and keep everyone in the same small crab bucket. It's to make access to the powerful tools as universal and ubiquitous as possible.

> I push files to a web server and restart its process.

Your friend not being sensible enough to know when to use a tool vs when to keep it simple is not a problem of the tool. Also, talking about deployment methods seems so orthogonal to the discussion that I am not sure it makes sense to carry this conversation further.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#94

Post by Gormo »

sneak wrote: post #59
bayindirh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option “B” implies a cat and mouse game, which you can never win. You can’t win a game designed and implemented by a mega corporation which is specially made to earn them money and protect their monopoly by being reactive and defending all the time. Instead you have to change the game and play with your own rules. That’s option “A”.

Not really. You could have tinyweb/oldweb sites identify themselves with a meta tag, and have a browser that only browses those. A opt-in, web-within-a-web. And turns off js, cookies, and images. You don’t need another transport protocol.

How do you stop users who aren't using the custom browser from accessing these 'tinyweb' HTTP sites? How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you suppress direct incorporation of 'mainstream' web content into 'tinyweb' content?

If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web, and you're already going to have to develop custom clients, content formats, and server-side configuration to implement it on top of HTTP, and engage in lots of development work to imperfectly isolate the two ecosystems from each other, why wouldn't you just develop a parallel protocol and start with a clean slate?

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#95

Post by Gormo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #50

Gemini the protocol is still a bit mysterious to me. Why not use plain HTTPS and just serve a new text/x.gemini MIME type? Or even serve plain old text/html and enforce no-JS-or-CSS in the Gemini client.

Because then it would be using HTTPS, and would not be isolated from the web in the way Gemini intends.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#96

Post by Gormo »

grep_name wrote: post #76
jmclnx wrote: post #73

FWIW, I have moved my WEB site to Gemini an decided a little later to mirror it on gopher (for fun). I find maintaining these 2 sites far easier then dealing with html and the *panels I need to use to upload to my old WEB site. People who have never viewed Gemini are missing some decent content.

I checked out gemini maybe four years ago? And I remember really liking the idea but struggling to find content. Got any tips?

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/

gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#97

Post by Gormo »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #9

Does gemini have any concept of feeds or pub/sub? I noted there were a few capsules that acted as a sort of hub for other peoples capsules. which suggested to me there was a way to automate it, and I might be able to make my own

Does gemini have any concept of feeds or pub/sub?

Yes: https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/companion/subscription.gmi

Many clients, including my favorite, Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/) support feed subscriptions.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#98

Post by rglullis »

Gormo wrote: post #86
rglullis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that the choice of protocol (much like the browser) is not a relevant factor if your goal is to be able to participate in the www without dealing with the issues. We can have all the upside of an http-based web, without dealing with the downsides. The converse is not true. A Gemini network is by design limited in functionality, which is a downside that can not be mitigated.

> My point is that the choice of protocol (much like the browser) is not a relevant factor if your goal is to be able to participate in the www without dealing with the issues. Right, but that isn't the goal of Gemini. It's goal is to create a distinct ecosystem, not to participate in the existing one with marginally less annoyance.

Even worse! This makes the whole proposal even more misguided.

Different ecosystems only make sense when we have distinct populations that might be as well considered different species.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#99

Post by Gormo »

rglullis wrote: post #98
Gormo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that the choice of protocol (much like the browser) is not a relevant factor if your goal is to be able to participate in the www without dealing with the issues. Right, but that isn't the goal of Gemini. It's goal is to create a distinct ecosystem, not to participate in the existing one with marginally less annoyance.

Even worse! This makes the whole proposal even more misguided. Different ecosystems only make sense when we have distinct populations that might be as well considered different species.

There's no 'proposal' here -- this is a review of an active ecosystem that has already had its ideas implemented and iterated on for the past six years.

Having a different ecosystem is the exact intention of this project. If that's not for you, you're certainly not required to participate, but the world is a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global mean. Complaining that non-mainstream stuff exists seems pretty nuts to me -- the world is full of 'distinct populations'.

Re: Six Years of Gemini

#100

Post by uamgeoalsk »

rglullis wrote: post #39
uamgeoalsk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more fun? Definitely A.

You are not solving the stated problem. You are just admitting that working on a new protocol is a masturbatory, "the journey is the reward" kind of exercise.

I'm not aiming to solve the stated problem, I'm having fun with gemini.
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