4 ms·

What on earth is Gemini?

by buggeryorkshire 6y ago

kwk1 6y ago
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
arkitaip 6y ago
The reactionary alternative to the web: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- lyxsus 6y ago
  Why?
  - SllX 6y ago
    Because the web has been taken over by commercial forces which seek to exploit your network bandwidth and computational resources without your permission to serve you ads, track your every move, steal and sell your information and mine crypto currency with the combined powers of dark patterns, supercookies, JavaScript, terms of service agreements and heart.
    - lyxsus 6y ago
      Sure, but what’s the end goal here? I just don’t get what prevents the history to repeat itself if it lifts off. And considering current web, which of these problems are technically unsolvable at the moment? We can have privacy-aware browser if we’d want to. Protocols are mostly ok. HTML and css are actually good in 2020. Javascript can be disabled. Ads are filterable and there’s nothing preventing it from spreading by other other channels. If that’s conceptually just a downgrade to bare minimum, how is it much better than lynx?
      - SllX 6y ago
        At this point an entire generation or two of people have reached adulthood since WorldWideWeb 1.0 and may have some childhood memories of the web around 1998 or 1999 or have heard tales of what the web was once like where people were naïve and put their entire life's story in pre-blog format and got to just figure shit out together in University dorm rooms, computer labs, early startups and IRC. Some people just want to experience a little bit of what that was like, and Lynx isn't it. That's how I tend to look at projects like Gemini and Gopherspace necromancy. It's something a little bit different, a little bit cool, not subject to Eternal September, and just technical enough to scare all the suits away because the suits already have the web. If any of these projects have any amount of commercial success, then yes, we likely would see something like what happened with the commercialization of the web happen all over again. In the mean time, it's a place to put stuff that a small niche of likeminded people might discover and read and maybe experience a little bit of that early magic of the early web themselves. You could just have a website and a blog, or you can have a gopherspace and a... uh, glog? Splog? I'll leave that one for someone else to figure out. But more importantly, you can do so without someone trying to run remote code in a client on your machine in a standard language that for some reason, every client in the world thought it was a good idea to incorporate an interpreter for.
        msla 6y ago
        > Some people just want to experience a little bit of what that was like, and Lynx isn't it. I don't know, Lynx dates to 1992. Can't get much older than that with Web software. It has MS-DOS versions and was written by someone who became a founding engineer of Netscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
        SllX 6y ago
        Lynx can be the same as it ever was, but the web that you can browse with Lynx is a different web than it was in 1992. Good to keep around though. :)
      - 6y ago
- sturza 6y ago
  are there also images?
  - ac29 6y ago
    Inline images are explicitly "not wanted for Gemini" per the FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html
Jaruzel 6y ago
As a big gopher user[1] I feel that Gemini was born out the frustration of gopher not having a standard SSL mechanism. There's been several attempts to weld SSL onto gopher resulting in a fractured landscape. One of the major desires is to not break legacy clients which makes implementation tricky. I've been following the Gemini mailing list for some time now, and I am still not a fan. it feels a lot like re-inventing the wheel, instead of working with existing protocols (like gopher). It also seems to be a passion project of one person, albeit with a large community of followers. --- [1] Shameless plug: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...

What on earth is Gemini?

kwk1 6y ago

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

arkitaip 6y ago

The reactionary alternative to the web: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

lyxsus 6y ago
Why?
- SllX 6y ago
  Because the web has been taken over by commercial forces which seek to exploit your network bandwidth and computational resources without your permission to serve you ads, track your every move, steal and sell your information and mine crypto currency with the combined powers of dark patterns, supercookies, JavaScript, terms of service agreements and heart.
  - lyxsus 6y ago
    Sure, but what’s the end goal here? I just don’t get what prevents the history to repeat itself if it lifts off. And considering current web, which of these problems are technically unsolvable at the moment? We can have privacy-aware browser if we’d want to. Protocols are mostly ok. HTML and css are actually good in 2020. Javascript can be disabled. Ads are filterable and there’s nothing preventing it from spreading by other other channels. If that’s conceptually just a downgrade to bare minimum, how is it much better than lynx?
    - SllX 6y ago
      At this point an entire generation or two of people have reached adulthood since WorldWideWeb 1.0 and may have some childhood memories of the web around 1998 or 1999 or have heard tales of what the web was once like where people were naïve and put their entire life's story in pre-blog format and got to just figure shit out together in University dorm rooms, computer labs, early startups and IRC. Some people just want to experience a little bit of what that was like, and Lynx isn't it. That's how I tend to look at projects like Gemini and Gopherspace necromancy. It's something a little bit different, a little bit cool, not subject to Eternal September, and just technical enough to scare all the suits away because the suits already have the web. If any of these projects have any amount of commercial success, then yes, we likely would see something like what happened with the commercialization of the web happen all over again. In the mean time, it's a place to put stuff that a small niche of likeminded people might discover and read and maybe experience a little bit of that early magic of the early web themselves. You could just have a website and a blog, or you can have a gopherspace and a... uh, glog? Splog? I'll leave that one for someone else to figure out. But more importantly, you can do so without someone trying to run remote code in a client on your machine in a standard language that for some reason, every client in the world thought it was a good idea to incorporate an interpreter for.
      - msla 6y ago
        > Some people just want to experience a little bit of what that was like, and Lynx isn't it. I don't know, Lynx dates to 1992. Can't get much older than that with Web software. It has MS-DOS versions and was written by someone who became a founding engineer of Netscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
        SllX 6y ago
        Lynx can be the same as it ever was, but the web that you can browse with Lynx is a different web than it was in 1992. Good to keep around though. :)
    - 6y ago
sturza 6y ago
are there also images?
- ac29 6y ago
  Inline images are explicitly "not wanted for Gemini" per the FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html

Jaruzel 6y ago

As a big gopher user[1] I feel that Gemini was born out the frustration of gopher not having a standard SSL mechanism. There's been several attempts to weld SSL onto gopher resulting in a fractured landscape. One of the major desires is to not break legacy clients which makes implementation tricky. I've been following the Gemini mailing list for some time now, and I am still not a fan. it feels a lot like re-inventing the wheel, instead of working with existing protocols (like gopher). It also seems to be a passion project of one person, albeit with a large community of followers. --- [1] Shameless plug: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...