16 ms·

Gemini's "uselessness" is its killer feature

243 points by Melchizedek 5y ago

king_phil 5y ago
What is Gemini?
- ilaksh 5y ago
  https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  - h0l0cube 5y ago
    Or the direct answer to the question in the FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
- dddw 5y ago
  Better question maybe: why is Gemini?
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    Gemini is because some people are sick of the modern web. In the (idealised) olden days, the web was a place people posted content. An amateur could make a geocities that showed people their interests, an academic could have a collection of pages that acted as notes for their lectures, or a company could advertise the products that they sold. In the (distopianised) modern days, the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted, but most of which offer at least some attractive distraction, whose primary purpose is to develop a small number of competing databases about you to maximise the amount of money that can be extracted from you while minimising the amount of value that can be returned to you. The providers of the computer programs take particular steps which should cause rational people to distrust them (e.g. hiding the button that says "Save my choices" to discourage you from doing what you want and what they are obliged to permit you to do), but healthy people can only tolerate so much distrust in their day-to-day life that they become exhausted. Gemini starts with extensions to Gopher to develop something a little bit more like the first one. It acts as something like a safe space. It is based on a similar sort of principle to the black-and-white mode on a lot of modern phones, to discourage you from overusing it by making it less attractive. Although Gemini does support form submissions and CGI, the primary form of interaction as far as I know is to have multiple gemlogs. (I tried using Gemini last year when it was mentioned in this place. But the content I want - e.g. programming language API documentation - is not on Gemini, and I think the Hacker News proxy is read-only, so I began to forget about it. I think Gemini is perhaps a little bit too far over.)
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      > the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted Agreed, but Gemini does address the problem of surveillance. All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks. Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        > All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks. That's the problem with the current iteration of the internet. If you run a Gemini-based hidden service, they go away. > Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page. That's the problem for the client to take care of. Those clients that aren't built with web technologies are unlikely to be subject to accidental web technology execution.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  A modern successor to gopher, with some extra features to make it more useful in the modern day. Gopher was a competitor to the early web. It had a distinction between contentful pages and link pages, so it was less flexible than the HTML based web. I'm pretty sure this is one of the things Gemini fixes
squiggleblaz 5y ago
I am not convinced. Gemini is useless, and the Web is tracked, because Gemini is a platform for distributing data/documents, and the Web has become a platform for distributing random executable code. If Gemini documents could support static HTML and CSS (i.e. without anything like SCRIPT elements or cookies), it would be more useful to the people who it is intended to benefit - you could port Wikipedia or distribute journal articles - without being a tracker haven. I don't hate the modern web because I can read the results of a scientific study that mentions its statistics in tabular form. I hate the modern web because the first thing I have to do is sign away my right to be treated like a customer in business, a curious child in a library or a guest at a friends house, and instead must agree to involuntarily yield wealth for the company.
- minitech 5y ago
  A client for HTML and CSS is much more complicated to implement than a client for Gemini and its rich text format. But you can serve HTML pages over Gemini either way.
  - benrbray 5y ago
    Why a whole new protocol? Why not start a collective of like-minded users who design plain HTML/CSS websites that work for users who have JS disabled by default? As far as I can tell that would be a strict improvement over Gemini.
    - josephg 5y ago
      Probably. But you can see what would happen - without a new protocol or new document structure, traditional web browsers would work with the system. And because of that it wouldn't have an identity outside "the web, but worse". Gemini's different protocol isn't important for technical reasons. Its important for social reasons - to make it effortful to move content to gemini, and effortful for users to start using it. The result is that all the content and users on gemini are people who have done work to opted in to it. And the space populated by small community like that will necessarily end up different from the culture on the web. (If they were happy with the web, they would have stayed there.)
kissgyorgy 5y ago
I would say Gemini have about the same characteristics as Hacker News which is why we love it so much!
- detaro 5y ago
  HN is IMHO a good counter-response: It works just as it is on the web, and you afaik couldn't build it on Gemini, because having forms etc is "going to far" for Gemini. (And to be fair, if your model is the imaginary "good old web", then maybe forums are a step to far, because that's what mailing lists are for? It's an exercise in making things purposefully extra effort after all)
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    You can have forms on Gemini. > if your model is the imaginary "good old web" Is your assertion that the original cookie free, javascript free web was a hellscape of arbitrary executable code intended to exfiltrate as much monotisable information from the user as possible? Just because someone doesn't like the current situation doesn't mean the past was imaginary.
    - detaro 5y ago
      > You can have forms on Gemini. Oh interesting, had missed that when I took a look at it. > Is your assertion ... Obviously not, and responses like this from its proponents are a main reason I'm not interested in it, despite quite a lot of ideological overlap. Saying that not all was as perfect in the past as it's sometimes presented is not asserting that all everything today is better.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        We're not looking for perfect. We're looking for good enough. The web isn't.
      - squiggleblaz 5y ago
        > Obviously not, and responses like this from its proponents are a main reason I'm not interested in it, despite quite a lot of ideological overlap. Saying that not all was as perfect in the past as it's sometimes presented is not asserting that all everything today is better. Some people are optimising for different properties than the current web. They are developing new technologies to do that. It is entirely hostile to say that their model is 'the imaginary "good old web"' or to imply that they present the past as perfect (as you do here - clearly in poor faith). They do neither. They are learning from the past and the present and trying to develop some other technologies and a new community that addresses some of their concerns. With great success! It's strictly impossible for a person who advocates for Gemini to believe the past was perfect. A person who felt the past was perfect would be using the technologies of the past. The people who use Gemini want some things to be different, and find it productive to learn from the past and the present in building this new space. It is a new and fulfilling project. This entire thread is based around the premise that is sufficient as it is, even if a bazillion people aren't posting on it. No imaginary models need enter into it. Twice now you've used standard but false tropes: Anyone who wants to learn from the past and the present instead of accepting the present as good enough has an imaginary view of the past and believes the past is perfect. Some times, a person runs "git checkout -- some/file" while fully acknowledging that the reason they started editing some/file was because it wasn't perfect when they started. Sometimes a person runs "git bisect" to see how they next version of the code can have the wins of the past and the wins of the present. Acknowledging value in the past is not presenting it as perfect, nor mere imagination. If you don't like getting pushback for mischaracterising someone's opinions and projcets, feel free to not do that. If the main reason you're not interested in it is because people defend themselves against such unreasonable mischaracterisations, it's probably Gemini who's winning.
heisenbit 5y ago
I don‘t think survival of a new protocol is predicated on it being useless like a gnarly tree to a carpenter. It may be there are niches in which survival for gnarly technology is possible but like the quoted surviver tree they will be on hard to assault spaces like gnarly usecases.
draw_down 5y ago
This project seems silly and this piece is extremely overwrought.
meltedcapacitor 5y ago
Gemini feels like a job half done: the presentation layer is simplified, but the TCP/TLS stack is still there in all its monstrosity, and so is the model that the user agent downloads stuff from the authoritative source live in response to interaction, with all the associated issues, like leaking meta-data. It also lacks a discoverability protocol improving on the search engine model. These are hard problems arguably.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  TCP is not hard. It's not perfect, but for what Gemini needs (ordered guaranteed delivery of packets) it's a good tradeoff. Many firewalls would happily drop non TCP/UDP traffic as well, which would hurt adoption. For TLS, I agree it's a monstrosity, but it was an intentional protocol tradeoff. We really want to have privacy, so the only other way is to homebrew your crypto protocols (which is just as dangerous as homebrewing your crypto algorithms). Since we're basically stuck with TLS, Gemini asks the question of how to make TLS make a run for its money - and this is by using TLS asymmetric crypto keys for persistent or semi-persistant identity handled by the client. The HTTP web still doesn't have single sign-on, but Gemini does. Just present the same key everywhere. As for search, it's not like the HTTP web has a good discoverability story either. The only reason why we have search that can pull up any page based on any keyword is because we've spent decades selling our eyeballs to a company that indexed it all by sheer brute force. The Gemini web is arguably no different here - if someone wants to build a search engine, they are free to do so.
  - baq 5y ago
    > Since we're basically stuck with TLS, Gemini asks the question of how to make TLS make a run for its money - and this is by using TLS asymmetric crypto keys for persistent or semi-persistant identity handled by the client. The HTTP web still doesn't have single sign-on, but Gemini does. Just present the same key everywhere. and the selling point is 'no tracking'? i must be missing something.
    - jlundberg 5y ago
eulenteufel 5y ago
The analogy with the useless tree breaks down because gemini still has to be useful to some people. I can understand the tree living as an end in itself, less so for a web protocol. Gemini has a mission and if it's usage is too restricted it will barely be a safe space for anybody because barely anybody will be using it. It's a tradeoff and I can't judge if gemini got it right, but gemini obviously still wants to be useful in similar aspects in which it wants to be useless enough.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Gemini has a mission and if it's usage is too restricted it will barely be a safe space for anybody because barely anybody will be using it. I think that's the point. When you build a protocol so restrictive and ascetically minimalist that even HN and Lobste.rs, epicenters of the very sort of contrarian tech hipster anti-modernist elitism that brought it about mostly complain about it, it's clear that what you're really optimizing for isn't utility but ideological purity and cultural homogeneity.
  - ungamedplayer 5y ago
    TIL: protocols have a cuture.
    - krapp 5y ago
      Protocols can be built to reinforce the ideals of their creators, and thus attempt to create a culture around themselves, yes. For an example of this, see Urbit. Gemini exists to satisfy political and cultural, not technical, needs. Most of what Gemini users have to say regarding their preference for it, and its benefits and its purpose are almost entirely about culture, not technology - the web is too complex, the web is too mainstream, too commercial, no longer a small "quirky" community, too full of the wrong people using it the wrong way. We're here replying to an article whose entire thesis is that Gemini's technical shortcomings, it's "uselessness," is a killer feature for promoting a specific kind of culture, for preventing certain forms of expression and encouraging others, inviting certain kinds of people in, and keeping other kinds of people out. That it will never be extended is a decision based on enforcing culture, in the belief that any extra complexity, regardless of its utility, risks the protocol being used in ways that undermine its ideological basis. So yes, culture.
mattlondon 5y ago
I like the approach modern gopher clients are taking by natively supporting markdown content. Does Gemini not support that? Some people (maybe they call themselves "purists") rage against this and kind of insist that gopher is all about text and only text. To a certain extent they are right - gopher has traditionally been about text, but the designers of gopher didn't have this dogmatic obsession with text-only but actually wanted to do "VR", I e. a graphical 3D interface for gopher (complete with "flying" transitions between servers) as well as doing visual overlay over a globe etc showing where gopher servers were physically located. They had dreams of a much richer interface so I don't think we should artificially constrain ourselves. The real modern benefit of gopher is the lack of pervasive scripting and cookies/tracking (and FYI modern gopher clients and servers support TLS)
- shakna 5y ago
  > I like the approach modern gopher clients are taking by natively supporting markdown content. Does Gemini not support that? Gemini supports RFC2046 mime types. So you can serve using their own text/gemini, text/markdown, text/html, and so on. You can go ahead and serve images and video, too. It's up to the client to support the mime type, but a lot of clients have pretty wide-ranging support (a few actually are re-using a web browser engine, so have full support for a lot of formats). (And markdown will fallback to plain text when unsupported, which is what it is defined for, so would be fine).
chacha2 5y ago
It's a shame it can't add on any innovations that didn't make the cut to the current web, such as Ted Nelsons parallel documents. Seems like any interest in making technology more than a replica of reality has disappeared. Maybe its even going the opposite direction, that what we have in reality is too complicated to recreate so the digital becomes more constrictive than the real thing.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  We need a foothold first. The Web 3.0 (4.0?) took all the oxygen out of the room for Web+ technologies, so we first need a healthier ecosystem in which to frame the discussion.
  - andai 5y ago
    Could you elaborate please?
fsiefken 5y ago
I really like the idea but reading this in the FAQ disappoints me: "Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads" Back in the day in the time of BBS with Fidonet or Usenet, I really liked the offline first mentality. With zmodem you had compressed and resumable downloads, with Echomail and Fidonet and POP3/Usenet you had offline first forums. But the same FAQ says Gemini is also for those: "Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks, either by choice or necessity" This seems to be contradictory. Have compression, caching and resumable downloads omitted by default for the sake of simplicity or can it still be added to the protocol? What's the rationale? A more formal seperation of simplicity of presentation and use within slow and frequently disconnected networks? That if you for example want zstd compression you can use a VPN? Or that if you want resumable downloads or caching you can use a local proxy? With the right proxy or browser one could emulate Gemini experience with the regular www, similar to using the old Opera Mini or force Reader View, block all images, javascript and ads on all sites. Wouldn't that be 'better'?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > with Echomail and Fidonet and POP3/Usenet you had offline first forums. One of the side effects of ActivityPub is to standardize a "post new content" endpoint that might be used by offline-first clients with intermittent connectivity. This is in addition to getting content via ActivityStreams format, which can be implemented very easily, even by a cheap, statically-hosted site with no reliance on JS webtech.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    That’s the other direction, isn’t it? The point of UUCP, NNTP, and Echonet (and SMTP, for that matter) is message distribution between servers with intermittent connectivity by batching and relaying messages. Can I host an ActivityPub node that both publishes and receives (and, if we’re talking Echomail, relays) stuff if I only have an Internet connection for an hour per day? Can the whole federation function like that? (An ActivityPub-NNTP interconnect sounds like something that public-inbox really should support, now that I think about it.)
_Nat_ 5y ago
Seems like some folks like simple stuff because they feel more included in the magic of it all. Kinda like.. some folks like manual-transmission cars with simple constructions that they can modify. Or machine-code/assembly. Or building their own computer. Because then they're not just a user -- an outsider to those who've actually created the technology -- but rather a fellow creator and equal participant. Projects like this give me the same vibe. This is, I'm skeptical that anyone's doing this because it's practical, even in its minimalism -- instead, it seems more like a hobbyist project where folks can feel included.
- app4soft 5y ago
  > Seems like some folks like simple stuff because they feel more included in the magic of it all. Gemini vs. HTTP ~ HN vs. Reddit
  - iSnow 5y ago
    Wait, I like HN very much, but that's just wrong. HN is basically what one tech-subreddit would be. This is fine, but not very inclusive, just because it is focused. People also like Facebook which is far from simple stuff. Inclusiveness via simplicity is just one axis in the space of why people like things.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >This is fine, but not very inclusive, just because it is focused That's neither here, nor there though. You can have 20,000 other individual Hacker News style sites on every subject, and the simplicity would still be there on each individual one. Not every thing has to be everything to everybody, for the category of the thing to be inclusive. And Gemini is not like content or like a speficifically-themed website like HN, it's a content delivery format (like HTTP/Gopher/etc). The allusion between Gemini to HN was for the simplicity of the presentation, wasn't referring to the kind of content HN carries. In a site's with HN design the content could still be whatever, from whaling to development, and from rocket science to religious practices. (If anything, something like Gemini would be much easier to make inclusive to e.g. low powered devices in the developing world, or screen readers, compared to the modern ultra dynamic news and content websites that have tons of moving parts, trackers, popups, interstitials, animations, and random JS just to deliver news and text content).
slver 5y ago
The initial quote is very odd. Someone complaining you can't do newspaper layouts in Gemini. Newspaper layouts are determined by the needs of the medium, that being fixed content printed on paper of specific proportions. Gemini isn't useless because it can't do some arbitrary thing, but I think it's useless because it has no pragmatic purpose. The article author even claims it won't be modified once it's formal. It's like the definition of "dead on arrival".
username91 5y ago
Browsing around the Gemini community is a thousand times more relaxing than reading on the web. I really recommend picking a nice client and enjoying a look around.
- oscargrouch 5y ago
  This is funny because the only way for Gemini to keep that way, is by not becoming popular. Because that's exactly what happened to the web. It was also an idyllic place in the beginning that got crowded, and giving we didn't figure it out the next step beyond capitalism the trash from our material world started to fill the digital realm because we are still in the same culture. So to solve the problem Gemini is trying to solve, is not by fixing the web standards, but by fixing our culture, which is a much harder and bigger problem. Gemini will want to keep working, than it will figure it out a way to sustain itself economically that in turn will make it possible to create profitable services on it, and it will be just a matter of time to become exactly as the web is now. If it doesn't take that path, giving the Web is a superset of it and it doesn't provide a unique value on its own, it will probably fade away or keep very niche.
  - username91 5y ago
    > ..the only way for Gemini to keep that way, is by not becoming popular. Because that's exactly what happened to the web. I felt like the web's "change" was when it became skewed towards high-bandwidth content like images and videos, more so than popularity alone. I can't imagine Gemini becoming as popular, but if it does, another new protocol can grow. :) > it will probably fade away or keep very niche Sounds nice, actually.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    The whole reason why the Web became what it is, is because HTML tags and JavaScript allowed for unbounded feature creep. Gemini purposely specifies a simple protocol that puts boundaries around what's allowed. You would need a critical mass to get an extended Gemini off the ground now. Between the die-hardness of the early adopter community that realises that this extensibility is why they needed Gemini in the first place, the support for HTML and Markdown mimetypes over the core protocol (to alleviate some pain points) and lack of commercial attention, I have high hopes for Gemini. > it will figure it out a way to sustain itself economically Why should it? It's not a platform for commerce. Hosting a Gemini server on a residential connection has a negligible cost (a Pi and a few kilowatt-hours per year). Some small web communities host it for free. For personal expression, Gemini should be very cheap.
Semiapies 5y ago
My problem is that protocols and software are not trees with their own imperatives for existence. They're just tools for people, and a useless tool gets neglected. Even a fun tool that's not as capable as others gets used less and less over time, once you get past a period of infatuation. And with a small user base, that trend turns into a death spiral. I'm curious to see how long Gemini keeps an active community.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Gopher seemed to have a healthy (if small) adoption for years after it was declared dead. If Gemini becomes a Gopher+, then it has a strong chance at staying around.
  - Semiapies 5y ago
    Gopher has actually evolved since, though. The Gemini community doesn't want their protocol to evolve.
    - spc476 5y ago
      The Gopher+ protocol doesn't seem to be that popular in practice, and the only evolution of the gopher protocol since the mid-90s is the introduction of a few new selector types not found in RFC-1436 (like 'i' and 'h'), and the switch to UTF-8 (instead of ISO-8859-1 mentioned in RFC-1436). There are a few servers and clients that support TLS for gopher, but it's not exactly a good fit [1]. [1] http://boston.conman.org/2019/03/31.1 http://boston.conman.org/2019/03/31.1
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        My bad, I didn't realise that Gopher+ was an actual protocol. I simply meant to use that name as a placeholder for something that's slightly more than basic Gopher, not to refer to any specific proposal.
qwerty456127 5y ago
Indeed, tables are an essential a thing which should be there, but it should be implemented in a way which makes it impossible to abuse it for layout, it should only be used to represent actual tables. I would even add column data types so the browser would be able to let the user sort them in a meaningful way (e.g. I hate Wikipedia tables which have sorting but can only be sorted alphabetically or something like that). As for multi-column layout - it's a work for the browser to do on the user demand. View should be decoupled from the content. For cases when you want to control every aspect of how is the information displayed there is HTML. Things like Gemini should not have formatting features besides those semantic which MarkDown has.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Even better. Gemini supports alternative content types, so there's nothing to prevent you from serving up Markdown documents in response to a Gemini request. Worst case, your client will display it as plaintext (which will be still very readable), or in the best case, it will kindly render it into something pretty but still simple.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  The fact that tables must be sorted with JavaScript is a fundamental flaw in the HTML specification. Sortable tables that the website cannot ask to be unsortable are a strong disincentive to use those tables for layout. Mandatory thick & ugly borders would also help.
pmlnr 5y ago
The only issue with gemini is that is should parse gopher for backwards compatibility.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Lagrange handles both gemini and gopher URLs. It's pretty seamless.
  - pmlnr 5y ago
    I mean the gemini servers.
- nikikravchuk 5y ago
  Absolutely
api 5y ago
The lack of images is really an important "feature." Images seem to do something to the human brain. They grab attention in ways text does not as evidenced by the fact that a dumb image meme can be used as an anchor point to advance the most inane bullshit in either meme or short-attention-span text form. Image boards and their capacity to originate and amplify utterly inane bullshit are the canonical case, and the format illustrates the principle exactly. Each post consists of an attention grabbing catchy image along with text that is usually one or more of banal, mean spirited, or irrational, and the image meme sells the message to the point that these sites almost feel like cults. Take the images away and there is virtually nothing compelling there. Edit: there was interesting stuff on the chans once. 4chan was not always identical to /pol. The fact that /pol, originally a containment board, became 4chan and edged out everything else tells you everything you need to know about the format and the medium and what kind of thinking it encourages. Media guides discourse. This is the most important idea of Marshall McLuhan and why we still talk about him; "the medium is the message." When the quality of the ideas on a medium almost universally declines over time, the medium is the problem not the users of it.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  The lack of images limits the ability to create Gemini content on many subjects, however. Just off the top of my head I could name discussion of artworks, some travel writing (no, it isn't all just inane "influencer" shots – bicycle tourers and overlanders like getting some photos to have an idea of what the terrain to traverse is like), building stuff, classical philology where the original edition of a text as it was typeset has to be examined, and so on. These are subjects for which there are already many minimalist HTML blogs around, but the lack of image support on Gemini makes it impossible for them to support that ecosystem.
  - RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
    Nothing about Gemini prevents you from linking to images. Furthermore, nothing prevents Gemini clients from eagerly fetching linked images (based on the URI) and displaying them inline- if the user chooses such a client. Being strictly text-oriented is simply the default, and a default that must be taken seriously by anyone writing a page.
syrrim 5y ago
People make out fine without a useless protocol, I think. There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. As the lobste.rs quote points out, gemini goes a step beyond that, in banning many features that even very minimal websites might want to use. When I think of a minimal website, I think of danluu.com. But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I suppose they could be replaced with carefully formatted code blocks, but these would be harder for danluu to make, and would look worse to the reader. Consider the dictum from motherfuckingwebsite.com: "shit works on all devices"; codeblocks work very poorly across devices. I think claiming that gemini is intentionally useless is a bad excuse. Gemini includes some features, but doesn't include others. There needs to be better reasoning behind the fetures it excludes.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. Gemini is a social space as well as a protocol. Part of why it's got such a sharp break with HTTP than e.g. being a subset of HTTP with a special client, is to demarcate such a space for those who want it. Minimal websites still operate within the larger context of the HTTP web, where this demarcation doesn't exist. Click a link to a Facebook profile from that small blog and you've unwittingly chosen to load half a megabyte of markup and tracking scripts. This is not possible with Gemini because such a capability simply is outside the protocol. > But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I agree that this could be annoying. Gemini has support for alternate mimetypes, so it's possible to return Markdown to the client. I think that Markdown is still in the spirit of Gemini's minimalism, but it does support more things (including tables). If a particular client refuses to render markdown, it's still readable as plaintext.
aceArtGmbH 5y ago
How about replacing HTML with Markdown? Markdown is simpler than HTML, but has more to offer than Gemini. You could have tables, images and depending on the flavor also checkboxes. Client side styling would also be easily possible. And if you want a simple browser, you don't even have to parse it and simply show the plain text. You do not have to be a programmer to write Markdown and many writers already write in Markdown and then convert to HTML.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  Both Markdown and Gemini's markup are missing some semantic tagging useful for screenreaders. The disabled should not be second-class citizens in any new web community.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    What semantic tagging does markdown miss?
    - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
      Take ISO-639 tagging for words in a foreign language different from the main language of the document. For example, real should be pronounced by the screenreader differently in English and Spanish, coin differently in English, French or Irish, etc. A screenreader might be able to use some heuristic to identify the language of longer snippets of text, but for one-off words it doesn’t have enough data to work with. HTML has the lang="" tag to guide screenreaders, but I am not aware of any Markdown equivalent.
      - samatman 5y ago
        How common is the use of these affordances in practice? I'm just now discovering that it's possible. I'll say this: it's very cool that it's possible to make text more accessible to people using a screenreader than it is to people reading it raw. For instance, if I were to refer to the real real, I would do what I just did, and italicize the word to indicate that it's foreign. Someone who knows how Spanish works can interpolate from "italic real" and get /real/ instead of /ri:l/ out of it, and that's basically what a screenreader would do, literally say "italic real". I'm not convinced that accessibility demands that words be pronounced properly under such circumstances. Note that someone completely ignorant of Spanish would just see "italic real" and maybe think it represents emphasis, so the sighted are not at an advantage here. Again, it's pretty cool that there's a way to do it in HTML! Semantic markup is neat, even if it doesn't get used much.
crazypython 5y ago
Why not simply use HTML with JS off, plus userscripts to block cookie banners and sticky headers? You get modern CSS features like column display.
web007 5y ago
> Gemini will remain as it is, frustrating anyone trying to extract value out of it. Why am I going to use anything if I'm not trying to extract value? I don't mean in the sense of "make money off of lusers", I mean as in "do something that provides value for my effort". I used gopher to "extract value" 25 years ago, but it turns out I want inline links and images and formatting and interaction (and compression and caching et al) because they're really useful. Look no further than HN for the Gemini ideal use-case, but even here the experience would be worse because of its restrictions. Reading the spec, Gemini seems like it wants to be the elitist / hipster version of both gopher and HT(TP|ML). It forgets that a lot of user-agent features are pro-user, even if they've been co-opted for nefarious means. It's the CLI tech nerd's dream of a user interface, and discounts both the evolution of the web and of UI/UX design over the past 30 years.
- pizzazzaro 5y ago
  Hi, rando here. I'd just like to say, "for the lulz," as is a grand tradition in the internet. And, as an end-user? A little respect might be nice.
- zxzax 5y ago
  As far as I can see, the value seems to be in using code golfing as a form of artistic programming. Probably useless, but not any more so than your average video game, or theater performance, or art museum...
- II2II 5y ago
  Those who use Gemini find value in it. Their definition of value may be different. It may be expressed in terms of the type of community they wish to participate in, the type of environment they wish to expose themselves to, the hobbies they pursue, how they entertain themselves, or any other reason that keeps them returning. Painting people with negative stereotypes simply because they seek something different from their online experience is uncalled for. Nothing compels people to use Gemini aside from their own personal interest. Its imprint upon the world is so minuscule that it is impossible to complain of incidental impacts. Simply put, it will not affect the lives of those who choose to ignore it. Contrast that to the web, which is virtually impossible to escape while remaining functional in the modern world. And why paint it in terms of negatives? People tend to compare Gemini to a crippled version of the web simply because that's what most of the world uses, but is more accurate to claim it is a modernized version of Gopher. It simplifies linking to other documents. It is possible to reformat text for small screens. It adds a layer of security. These are all positives.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
It's funny and poignant to see this sincere discussion here, at the very heart of the commercial web
- carapace 5y ago
  Heh. It seems to me that the discussion here is just rehashing all the discussion on the Gemini mailing list from the past few years.
Someone 5y ago
Other products that “can’t emulate typography produced on a daily basis – often in a hurry – 150 years ago”, but that you may have heard of: Twitter, WhatsApp. Also, how well does html do multiple columns with text flowing between them nowadays? ⇒ I don’t think the original argument is a strong one.
- thaunatos 5y ago
  > Also, how well does html do multiple columns with text flowing between them nowadays? With the CSS property `columns`, this is pretty easy to do: https://jsfiddle.net/52j401rg/ https://jsfiddle.net/52j401rg/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/columns https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/columns
teucris 5y ago
The author’s response doesn’t really address the complaint in the post quoted. The complaint was that Gemini lacks basic utility. Intentionally making things that lack utility is a great way to express an idea, but to me that’s an art form or a statement, not a tool. Gemini is a communication tool. While it’s noble to make something that is difficult to extract value from, a tool has to serve a purpose. The complaints, to me, feel legitimate critiques for a communication tool. Whenever I venture into the Gemini-verse, I feel like I’m peeking into personal diaries left out at random. I am not a person to shy away from a good search for interesting information. But on Gemini, I don’t see a point in digging. That makes me feel like it’s still lacking as a communication tool.
- alexwennerberg 5y ago
  > that’s an art form or a statement, not a tool. (Author here) I would definitely view Gemini more along those lines. Gemini is an interesting space to inhabit and explore -- a space dramatically different than the modern web due to its design. That's the value in it for me!
aaron-santos 5y ago
> If your technology can’t emulate typography produced on a daily basis – often in a hurry – 150 years ago then your tech is rather limited. Just wait until Alex hears about illuminated manuscripts from the 13th century. Gemini's inability to depict historiated initials is an even bigger tragedy.
easterncalculus 5y ago
I'm glad to see this article and posts like the one mentioned because Gemini really doesn't make sense. It seems like a hobbyist project that people now are getting defensive about when questioned on the value of its spread and existence. Gemini misses the point. The problem with the web is Javascript, not italics. It's a good example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Animats 5y ago
Direct browser support for Markdown would accomplish many of the same goals.
Madeindjs 5y ago
I dislike that Gemini require an another web server and another web browser. Isn't Gemeni can be simplified to a convention that forbid CSS/JavaScript and allow only basic tags of HTML (<h1-6>, <p>, <a>, etc..)? IMO this could be a better move because this will use any performances improvement made on modern web stack (cache, compression, etc..).
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Yeah I was thinking that if the system just piggybacked on HTTP's Accept headers, it could be run on any common web hosting service. I could, for example, add a Gemini endpoint to my PHP site.
kixiQu 5y ago
To all: please consider reading the Gemini faq [1] before chiming in with impressions of the project. You definitely don't have to agree with the rationales, but the discussion is impoverished without understanding their angle on those decisions. (Esp. seeing a lot of people who might be interested by "2.5 Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?") [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
reanimus 5y ago
Gemini always seemed like more a political statement than a useful tool, imo
bawolff 5y ago
The gemini faq talks about not having any feature, intentional or unintentional that can be used for user tracking...and then talks about TLS client certificates being first class citizens. Guess im a bit confused on the design criteria.
- yladiz 5y ago
  Can TLS certificates in the way that Gemini uses them be used to track end users?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Presumably? I haven't read the gemini spec or know how they use them, but the entire point of a tls certificate (whether client or server) is to give a persistent identity that can't be faked. Edit: found the spec - https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html Sounds like they're passing the buck a bit to the client. Client can decide how long lived, so its up to the user if they want to use a long lived identity or a short lived one. Doesn't sound all that different from cookies to me. In old web browsers you were always prompted if you wanted to accept each and every cookie. Everyone clicked yes so web browsers stopped asking. This seems the same.
GuB-42 5y ago
The big problem I have with Gemini is TLS. That makes it way too complex and also breaks the ideal of a complete, unmoving spec since cyphers tend to change as weaknesses are found. It also requires certificate management with roots of trust, expiration dates, etc... You basically need libs, which is a problem on its own. TCP is also a bit of complexity but not as much, and it is not mandatory, unlike TLS. And now, since uselessness is the topic. Or more precisely, that Gemini can't be polluted like the web because it is useless, don't you think mandating the lack of encryption would make it even more "useless". I mean, really, why do people want https? Why do Google insist so much on https? The biggest reason is e-commerce. The secret you have that everyone wants to know is your credit card number, and more generally, everything that allows someone to make a transaction on your behalf. Really for most people, https protects the bank account. So, if you think that the commercial web is the enemy, making a protocol that is unsuitable for commerce can be an idea. I took the reasoning from the ham radio rule that bans encryption. Simply, it is a way to keep most commercial operations out and keep it an amateur thing.
fsiefken 5y ago
Sourcehut supports Gemini pages. Sourcehut sysop Drew DeVault has a Gemini presence as well. https://portal.drewdevault.com/x/srht.site https://portal.drewdevault.com/x/srht.site https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.htm...

243 points by Melchizedek 5y ago

king_phil 5y ago

What is Gemini?

ilaksh 5y ago
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  Or the direct answer to the question in the FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
dddw 5y ago
Better question maybe: why is Gemini?
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  Gemini is because some people are sick of the modern web. In the (idealised) olden days, the web was a place people posted content. An amateur could make a geocities that showed people their interests, an academic could have a collection of pages that acted as notes for their lectures, or a company could advertise the products that they sold. In the (distopianised) modern days, the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted, but most of which offer at least some attractive distraction, whose primary purpose is to develop a small number of competing databases about you to maximise the amount of money that can be extracted from you while minimising the amount of value that can be returned to you. The providers of the computer programs take particular steps which should cause rational people to distrust them (e.g. hiding the button that says "Save my choices" to discourage you from doing what you want and what they are obliged to permit you to do), but healthy people can only tolerate so much distrust in their day-to-day life that they become exhausted. Gemini starts with extensions to Gopher to develop something a little bit more like the first one. It acts as something like a safe space. It is based on a similar sort of principle to the black-and-white mode on a lot of modern phones, to discourage you from overusing it by making it less attractive. Although Gemini does support form submissions and CGI, the primary form of interaction as far as I know is to have multiple gemlogs. (I tried using Gemini last year when it was mentioned in this place. But the content I want - e.g. programming language API documentation - is not on Gemini, and I think the Hacker News proxy is read-only, so I began to forget about it. I think Gemini is perhaps a little bit too far over.)
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted Agreed, but Gemini does address the problem of surveillance. All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks. Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      > All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks. That's the problem with the current iteration of the internet. If you run a Gemini-based hidden service, they go away. > Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page. That's the problem for the client to take care of. Those clients that aren't built with web technologies are unlikely to be subject to accidental web technology execution.
squiggleblaz 5y ago
A modern successor to gopher, with some extra features to make it more useful in the modern day. Gopher was a competitor to the early web. It had a distinction between contentful pages and link pages, so it was less flexible than the HTML based web. I'm pretty sure this is one of the things Gemini fixes

squiggleblaz 5y ago

I am not convinced. Gemini is useless, and the Web is tracked, because Gemini is a platform for distributing data/documents, and the Web has become a platform for distributing random executable code. If Gemini documents could support static HTML and CSS (i.e. without anything like SCRIPT elements or cookies), it would be more useful to the people who it is intended to benefit - you could port Wikipedia or distribute journal articles - without being a tracker haven. I don't hate the modern web because I can read the results of a scientific study that mentions its statistics in tabular form. I hate the modern web because the first thing I have to do is sign away my right to be treated like a customer in business, a curious child in a library or a guest at a friends house, and instead must agree to involuntarily yield wealth for the company.

minitech 5y ago
A client for HTML and CSS is much more complicated to implement than a client for Gemini and its rich text format. But you can serve HTML pages over Gemini either way.
- benrbray 5y ago
  Why a whole new protocol? Why not start a collective of like-minded users who design plain HTML/CSS websites that work for users who have JS disabled by default? As far as I can tell that would be a strict improvement over Gemini.
  - josephg 5y ago
    Probably. But you can see what would happen - without a new protocol or new document structure, traditional web browsers would work with the system. And because of that it wouldn't have an identity outside "the web, but worse". Gemini's different protocol isn't important for technical reasons. Its important for social reasons - to make it effortful to move content to gemini, and effortful for users to start using it. The result is that all the content and users on gemini are people who have done work to opted in to it. And the space populated by small community like that will necessarily end up different from the culture on the web. (If they were happy with the web, they would have stayed there.)

kissgyorgy 5y ago

I would say Gemini have about the same characteristics as Hacker News which is why we love it so much!

detaro 5y ago
HN is IMHO a good counter-response: It works just as it is on the web, and you afaik couldn't build it on Gemini, because having forms etc is "going to far" for Gemini. (And to be fair, if your model is the imaginary "good old web", then maybe forums are a step to far, because that's what mailing lists are for? It's an exercise in making things purposefully extra effort after all)
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  You can have forms on Gemini. > if your model is the imaginary "good old web" Is your assertion that the original cookie free, javascript free web was a hellscape of arbitrary executable code intended to exfiltrate as much monotisable information from the user as possible? Just because someone doesn't like the current situation doesn't mean the past was imaginary.
  - detaro 5y ago
    > You can have forms on Gemini. Oh interesting, had missed that when I took a look at it. > Is your assertion ... Obviously not, and responses like this from its proponents are a main reason I'm not interested in it, despite quite a lot of ideological overlap. Saying that not all was as perfect in the past as it's sometimes presented is not asserting that all everything today is better.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      We're not looking for perfect. We're looking for good enough. The web isn't.
    - squiggleblaz 5y ago
      > Obviously not, and responses like this from its proponents are a main reason I'm not interested in it, despite quite a lot of ideological overlap. Saying that not all was as perfect in the past as it's sometimes presented is not asserting that all everything today is better. Some people are optimising for different properties than the current web. They are developing new technologies to do that. It is entirely hostile to say that their model is 'the imaginary "good old web"' or to imply that they present the past as perfect (as you do here - clearly in poor faith). They do neither. They are learning from the past and the present and trying to develop some other technologies and a new community that addresses some of their concerns. With great success! It's strictly impossible for a person who advocates for Gemini to believe the past was perfect. A person who felt the past was perfect would be using the technologies of the past. The people who use Gemini want some things to be different, and find it productive to learn from the past and the present in building this new space. It is a new and fulfilling project. This entire thread is based around the premise that is sufficient as it is, even if a bazillion people aren't posting on it. No imaginary models need enter into it. Twice now you've used standard but false tropes: Anyone who wants to learn from the past and the present instead of accepting the present as good enough has an imaginary view of the past and believes the past is perfect. Some times, a person runs "git checkout -- some/file" while fully acknowledging that the reason they started editing some/file was because it wasn't perfect when they started. Sometimes a person runs "git bisect" to see how they next version of the code can have the wins of the past and the wins of the present. Acknowledging value in the past is not presenting it as perfect, nor mere imagination. If you don't like getting pushback for mischaracterising someone's opinions and projcets, feel free to not do that. If the main reason you're not interested in it is because people defend themselves against such unreasonable mischaracterisations, it's probably Gemini who's winning.

heisenbit 5y ago

I don‘t think survival of a new protocol is predicated on it being useless like a gnarly tree to a carpenter. It may be there are niches in which survival for gnarly technology is possible but like the quoted surviver tree they will be on hard to assault spaces like gnarly usecases.

draw_down 5y ago

This project seems silly and this piece is extremely overwrought.

meltedcapacitor 5y ago

Gemini feels like a job half done: the presentation layer is simplified, but the TCP/TLS stack is still there in all its monstrosity, and so is the model that the user agent downloads stuff from the authoritative source live in response to interaction, with all the associated issues, like leaking meta-data. It also lacks a discoverability protocol improving on the search engine model. These are hard problems arguably.

selfhoster11 5y ago
TCP is not hard. It's not perfect, but for what Gemini needs (ordered guaranteed delivery of packets) it's a good tradeoff. Many firewalls would happily drop non TCP/UDP traffic as well, which would hurt adoption. For TLS, I agree it's a monstrosity, but it was an intentional protocol tradeoff. We really want to have privacy, so the only other way is to homebrew your crypto protocols (which is just as dangerous as homebrewing your crypto algorithms). Since we're basically stuck with TLS, Gemini asks the question of how to make TLS make a run for its money - and this is by using TLS asymmetric crypto keys for persistent or semi-persistant identity handled by the client. The HTTP web still doesn't have single sign-on, but Gemini does. Just present the same key everywhere. As for search, it's not like the HTTP web has a good discoverability story either. The only reason why we have search that can pull up any page based on any keyword is because we've spent decades selling our eyeballs to a company that indexed it all by sheer brute force. The Gemini web is arguably no different here - if someone wants to build a search engine, they are free to do so.
- baq 5y ago
  > Since we're basically stuck with TLS, Gemini asks the question of how to make TLS make a run for its money - and this is by using TLS asymmetric crypto keys for persistent or semi-persistant identity handled by the client. The HTTP web still doesn't have single sign-on, but Gemini does. Just present the same key everywhere. and the selling point is 'no tracking'? i must be missing something.
  - jlundberg 5y ago

eulenteufel 5y ago

The analogy with the useless tree breaks down because gemini still has to be useful to some people. I can understand the tree living as an end in itself, less so for a web protocol. Gemini has a mission and if it's usage is too restricted it will barely be a safe space for anybody because barely anybody will be using it. It's a tradeoff and I can't judge if gemini got it right, but gemini obviously still wants to be useful in similar aspects in which it wants to be useless enough.

krapp 5y ago
>Gemini has a mission and if it's usage is too restricted it will barely be a safe space for anybody because barely anybody will be using it. I think that's the point. When you build a protocol so restrictive and ascetically minimalist that even HN and Lobste.rs, epicenters of the very sort of contrarian tech hipster anti-modernist elitism that brought it about mostly complain about it, it's clear that what you're really optimizing for isn't utility but ideological purity and cultural homogeneity.
- ungamedplayer 5y ago
  TIL: protocols have a cuture.
  - krapp 5y ago
    Protocols can be built to reinforce the ideals of their creators, and thus attempt to create a culture around themselves, yes. For an example of this, see Urbit. Gemini exists to satisfy political and cultural, not technical, needs. Most of what Gemini users have to say regarding their preference for it, and its benefits and its purpose are almost entirely about culture, not technology - the web is too complex, the web is too mainstream, too commercial, no longer a small "quirky" community, too full of the wrong people using it the wrong way. We're here replying to an article whose entire thesis is that Gemini's technical shortcomings, it's "uselessness," is a killer feature for promoting a specific kind of culture, for preventing certain forms of expression and encouraging others, inviting certain kinds of people in, and keeping other kinds of people out. That it will never be extended is a decision based on enforcing culture, in the belief that any extra complexity, regardless of its utility, risks the protocol being used in ways that undermine its ideological basis. So yes, culture.

mattlondon 5y ago

I like the approach modern gopher clients are taking by natively supporting markdown content. Does Gemini not support that? Some people (maybe they call themselves "purists") rage against this and kind of insist that gopher is all about text and only text. To a certain extent they are right - gopher has traditionally been about text, but the designers of gopher didn't have this dogmatic obsession with text-only but actually wanted to do "VR", I e. a graphical 3D interface for gopher (complete with "flying" transitions between servers) as well as doing visual overlay over a globe etc showing where gopher servers were physically located. They had dreams of a much richer interface so I don't think we should artificially constrain ourselves. The real modern benefit of gopher is the lack of pervasive scripting and cookies/tracking (and FYI modern gopher clients and servers support TLS)

shakna 5y ago
> I like the approach modern gopher clients are taking by natively supporting markdown content. Does Gemini not support that? Gemini supports RFC2046 mime types. So you can serve using their own text/gemini, text/markdown, text/html, and so on. You can go ahead and serve images and video, too. It's up to the client to support the mime type, but a lot of clients have pretty wide-ranging support (a few actually are re-using a web browser engine, so have full support for a lot of formats). (And markdown will fallback to plain text when unsupported, which is what it is defined for, so would be fine).

chacha2 5y ago

It's a shame it can't add on any innovations that didn't make the cut to the current web, such as Ted Nelsons parallel documents. Seems like any interest in making technology more than a replica of reality has disappeared. Maybe its even going the opposite direction, that what we have in reality is too complicated to recreate so the digital becomes more constrictive than the real thing.

selfhoster11 5y ago
We need a foothold first. The Web 3.0 (4.0?) took all the oxygen out of the room for Web+ technologies, so we first need a healthier ecosystem in which to frame the discussion.
- andai 5y ago
  Could you elaborate please?

fsiefken 5y ago

I really like the idea but reading this in the FAQ disappoints me: "Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads" Back in the day in the time of BBS with Fidonet or Usenet, I really liked the offline first mentality. With zmodem you had compressed and resumable downloads, with Echomail and Fidonet and POP3/Usenet you had offline first forums. But the same FAQ says Gemini is also for those: "Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks, either by choice or necessity" This seems to be contradictory. Have compression, caching and resumable downloads omitted by default for the sake of simplicity or can it still be added to the protocol? What's the rationale? A more formal seperation of simplicity of presentation and use within slow and frequently disconnected networks? That if you for example want zstd compression you can use a VPN? Or that if you want resumable downloads or caching you can use a local proxy? With the right proxy or browser one could emulate Gemini experience with the regular www, similar to using the old Opera Mini or force Reader View, block all images, javascript and ads on all sites. Wouldn't that be 'better'?

zozbot234 5y ago
> with Echomail and Fidonet and POP3/Usenet you had offline first forums. One of the side effects of ActivityPub is to standardize a "post new content" endpoint that might be used by offline-first clients with intermittent connectivity. This is in addition to getting content via ActivityStreams format, which can be implemented very easily, even by a cheap, statically-hosted site with no reliance on JS webtech.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  That’s the other direction, isn’t it? The point of UUCP, NNTP, and Echonet (and SMTP, for that matter) is message distribution between servers with intermittent connectivity by batching and relaying messages. Can I host an ActivityPub node that both publishes and receives (and, if we’re talking Echomail, relays) stuff if I only have an Internet connection for an hour per day? Can the whole federation function like that? (An ActivityPub-NNTP interconnect sounds like something that public-inbox really should support, now that I think about it.)

_Nat_ 5y ago

Seems like some folks like simple stuff because they feel more included in the magic of it all. Kinda like.. some folks like manual-transmission cars with simple constructions that they can modify. Or machine-code/assembly. Or building their own computer. Because then they're not just a user -- an outsider to those who've actually created the technology -- but rather a fellow creator and equal participant. Projects like this give me the same vibe. This is, I'm skeptical that anyone's doing this because it's practical, even in its minimalism -- instead, it seems more like a hobbyist project where folks can feel included.

app4soft 5y ago
> Seems like some folks like simple stuff because they feel more included in the magic of it all. Gemini vs. HTTP ~ HN vs. Reddit
- iSnow 5y ago
  Wait, I like HN very much, but that's just wrong. HN is basically what one tech-subreddit would be. This is fine, but not very inclusive, just because it is focused. People also like Facebook which is far from simple stuff. Inclusiveness via simplicity is just one axis in the space of why people like things.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >This is fine, but not very inclusive, just because it is focused That's neither here, nor there though. You can have 20,000 other individual Hacker News style sites on every subject, and the simplicity would still be there on each individual one. Not every thing has to be everything to everybody, for the category of the thing to be inclusive. And Gemini is not like content or like a speficifically-themed website like HN, it's a content delivery format (like HTTP/Gopher/etc). The allusion between Gemini to HN was for the simplicity of the presentation, wasn't referring to the kind of content HN carries. In a site's with HN design the content could still be whatever, from whaling to development, and from rocket science to religious practices. (If anything, something like Gemini would be much easier to make inclusive to e.g. low powered devices in the developing world, or screen readers, compared to the modern ultra dynamic news and content websites that have tons of moving parts, trackers, popups, interstitials, animations, and random JS just to deliver news and text content).

slver 5y ago

The initial quote is very odd. Someone complaining you can't do newspaper layouts in Gemini. Newspaper layouts are determined by the needs of the medium, that being fixed content printed on paper of specific proportions. Gemini isn't useless because it can't do some arbitrary thing, but I think it's useless because it has no pragmatic purpose. The article author even claims it won't be modified once it's formal. It's like the definition of "dead on arrival".

username91 5y ago

Browsing around the Gemini community is a thousand times more relaxing than reading on the web. I really recommend picking a nice client and enjoying a look around.

oscargrouch 5y ago
This is funny because the only way for Gemini to keep that way, is by not becoming popular. Because that's exactly what happened to the web. It was also an idyllic place in the beginning that got crowded, and giving we didn't figure it out the next step beyond capitalism the trash from our material world started to fill the digital realm because we are still in the same culture. So to solve the problem Gemini is trying to solve, is not by fixing the web standards, but by fixing our culture, which is a much harder and bigger problem. Gemini will want to keep working, than it will figure it out a way to sustain itself economically that in turn will make it possible to create profitable services on it, and it will be just a matter of time to become exactly as the web is now. If it doesn't take that path, giving the Web is a superset of it and it doesn't provide a unique value on its own, it will probably fade away or keep very niche.
- username91 5y ago
  > ..the only way for Gemini to keep that way, is by not becoming popular. Because that's exactly what happened to the web. I felt like the web's "change" was when it became skewed towards high-bandwidth content like images and videos, more so than popularity alone. I can't imagine Gemini becoming as popular, but if it does, another new protocol can grow. :) > it will probably fade away or keep very niche Sounds nice, actually.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  The whole reason why the Web became what it is, is because HTML tags and JavaScript allowed for unbounded feature creep. Gemini purposely specifies a simple protocol that puts boundaries around what's allowed. You would need a critical mass to get an extended Gemini off the ground now. Between the die-hardness of the early adopter community that realises that this extensibility is why they needed Gemini in the first place, the support for HTML and Markdown mimetypes over the core protocol (to alleviate some pain points) and lack of commercial attention, I have high hopes for Gemini. > it will figure it out a way to sustain itself economically Why should it? It's not a platform for commerce. Hosting a Gemini server on a residential connection has a negligible cost (a Pi and a few kilowatt-hours per year). Some small web communities host it for free. For personal expression, Gemini should be very cheap.

Semiapies 5y ago

My problem is that protocols and software are not trees with their own imperatives for existence. They're just tools for people, and a useless tool gets neglected. Even a fun tool that's not as capable as others gets used less and less over time, once you get past a period of infatuation. And with a small user base, that trend turns into a death spiral. I'm curious to see how long Gemini keeps an active community.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Gopher seemed to have a healthy (if small) adoption for years after it was declared dead. If Gemini becomes a Gopher+, then it has a strong chance at staying around.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  Gopher has actually evolved since, though. The Gemini community doesn't want their protocol to evolve.
  - spc476 5y ago
    The Gopher+ protocol doesn't seem to be that popular in practice, and the only evolution of the gopher protocol since the mid-90s is the introduction of a few new selector types not found in RFC-1436 (like 'i' and 'h'), and the switch to UTF-8 (instead of ISO-8859-1 mentioned in RFC-1436). There are a few servers and clients that support TLS for gopher, but it's not exactly a good fit [1]. [1] http://boston.conman.org/2019/03/31.1 http://boston.conman.org/2019/03/31.1
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      My bad, I didn't realise that Gopher+ was an actual protocol. I simply meant to use that name as a placeholder for something that's slightly more than basic Gopher, not to refer to any specific proposal.

qwerty456127 5y ago

Indeed, tables are an essential a thing which should be there, but it should be implemented in a way which makes it impossible to abuse it for layout, it should only be used to represent actual tables. I would even add column data types so the browser would be able to let the user sort them in a meaningful way (e.g. I hate Wikipedia tables which have sorting but can only be sorted alphabetically or something like that). As for multi-column layout - it's a work for the browser to do on the user demand. View should be decoupled from the content. For cases when you want to control every aspect of how is the information displayed there is HTML. Things like Gemini should not have formatting features besides those semantic which MarkDown has.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Even better. Gemini supports alternative content types, so there's nothing to prevent you from serving up Markdown documents in response to a Gemini request. Worst case, your client will display it as plaintext (which will be still very readable), or in the best case, it will kindly render it into something pretty but still simple.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
The fact that tables must be sorted with JavaScript is a fundamental flaw in the HTML specification. Sortable tables that the website cannot ask to be unsortable are a strong disincentive to use those tables for layout. Mandatory thick & ugly borders would also help.

pmlnr 5y ago

The only issue with gemini is that is should parse gopher for backwards compatibility.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Lagrange handles both gemini and gopher URLs. It's pretty seamless.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  I mean the gemini servers.
nikikravchuk 5y ago
Absolutely

api 5y ago

The lack of images is really an important "feature." Images seem to do something to the human brain. They grab attention in ways text does not as evidenced by the fact that a dumb image meme can be used as an anchor point to advance the most inane bullshit in either meme or short-attention-span text form. Image boards and their capacity to originate and amplify utterly inane bullshit are the canonical case, and the format illustrates the principle exactly. Each post consists of an attention grabbing catchy image along with text that is usually one or more of banal, mean spirited, or irrational, and the image meme sells the message to the point that these sites almost feel like cults. Take the images away and there is virtually nothing compelling there. Edit: there was interesting stuff on the chans once. 4chan was not always identical to /pol. The fact that /pol, originally a containment board, became 4chan and edged out everything else tells you everything you need to know about the format and the medium and what kind of thinking it encourages. Media guides discourse. This is the most important idea of Marshall McLuhan and why we still talk about him; "the medium is the message." When the quality of the ideas on a medium almost universally declines over time, the medium is the problem not the users of it.

Mediterraneo10 5y ago
The lack of images limits the ability to create Gemini content on many subjects, however. Just off the top of my head I could name discussion of artworks, some travel writing (no, it isn't all just inane "influencer" shots – bicycle tourers and overlanders like getting some photos to have an idea of what the terrain to traverse is like), building stuff, classical philology where the original edition of a text as it was typeset has to be examined, and so on. These are subjects for which there are already many minimalist HTML blogs around, but the lack of image support on Gemini makes it impossible for them to support that ecosystem.
- RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
  Nothing about Gemini prevents you from linking to images. Furthermore, nothing prevents Gemini clients from eagerly fetching linked images (based on the URI) and displaying them inline- if the user chooses such a client. Being strictly text-oriented is simply the default, and a default that must be taken seriously by anyone writing a page.

syrrim 5y ago

People make out fine without a useless protocol, I think. There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. As the lobste.rs quote points out, gemini goes a step beyond that, in banning many features that even very minimal websites might want to use. When I think of a minimal website, I think of danluu.com. But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I suppose they could be replaced with carefully formatted code blocks, but these would be harder for danluu to make, and would look worse to the reader. Consider the dictum from motherfuckingwebsite.com: "shit works on all devices"; codeblocks work very poorly across devices. I think claiming that gemini is intentionally useless is a bad excuse. Gemini includes some features, but doesn't include others. There needs to be better reasoning behind the fetures it excludes.

selfhoster11 5y ago
> There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. Gemini is a social space as well as a protocol. Part of why it's got such a sharp break with HTTP than e.g. being a subset of HTTP with a special client, is to demarcate such a space for those who want it. Minimal websites still operate within the larger context of the HTTP web, where this demarcation doesn't exist. Click a link to a Facebook profile from that small blog and you've unwittingly chosen to load half a megabyte of markup and tracking scripts. This is not possible with Gemini because such a capability simply is outside the protocol. > But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I agree that this could be annoying. Gemini has support for alternate mimetypes, so it's possible to return Markdown to the client. I think that Markdown is still in the spirit of Gemini's minimalism, but it does support more things (including tables). If a particular client refuses to render markdown, it's still readable as plaintext.

aceArtGmbH 5y ago

How about replacing HTML with Markdown? Markdown is simpler than HTML, but has more to offer than Gemini. You could have tables, images and depending on the flavor also checkboxes. Client side styling would also be easily possible. And if you want a simple browser, you don't even have to parse it and simply show the plain text. You do not have to be a programmer to write Markdown and many writers already write in Markdown and then convert to HTML.

Mediterraneo10 5y ago
Both Markdown and Gemini's markup are missing some semantic tagging useful for screenreaders. The disabled should not be second-class citizens in any new web community.
- lolinder 5y ago
  What semantic tagging does markdown miss?
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    Take ISO-639 tagging for words in a foreign language different from the main language of the document. For example, real should be pronounced by the screenreader differently in English and Spanish, coin differently in English, French or Irish, etc. A screenreader might be able to use some heuristic to identify the language of longer snippets of text, but for one-off words it doesn’t have enough data to work with. HTML has the lang="" tag to guide screenreaders, but I am not aware of any Markdown equivalent.
    - samatman 5y ago
      How common is the use of these affordances in practice? I'm just now discovering that it's possible. I'll say this: it's very cool that it's possible to make text more accessible to people using a screenreader than it is to people reading it raw. For instance, if I were to refer to the real real, I would do what I just did, and italicize the word to indicate that it's foreign. Someone who knows how Spanish works can interpolate from "italic real" and get /real/ instead of /ri:l/ out of it, and that's basically what a screenreader would do, literally say "italic real". I'm not convinced that accessibility demands that words be pronounced properly under such circumstances. Note that someone completely ignorant of Spanish would just see "italic real" and maybe think it represents emphasis, so the sighted are not at an advantage here. Again, it's pretty cool that there's a way to do it in HTML! Semantic markup is neat, even if it doesn't get used much.

crazypython 5y ago

Why not simply use HTML with JS off, plus userscripts to block cookie banners and sticky headers? You get modern CSS features like column display.

web007 5y ago

> Gemini will remain as it is, frustrating anyone trying to extract value out of it. Why am I going to use anything if I'm not trying to extract value? I don't mean in the sense of "make money off of lusers", I mean as in "do something that provides value for my effort". I used gopher to "extract value" 25 years ago, but it turns out I want inline links and images and formatting and interaction (and compression and caching et al) because they're really useful. Look no further than HN for the Gemini ideal use-case, but even here the experience would be worse because of its restrictions. Reading the spec, Gemini seems like it wants to be the elitist / hipster version of both gopher and HT(TP|ML). It forgets that a lot of user-agent features are pro-user, even if they've been co-opted for nefarious means. It's the CLI tech nerd's dream of a user interface, and discounts both the evolution of the web and of UI/UX design over the past 30 years.

pizzazzaro 5y ago
Hi, rando here. I'd just like to say, "for the lulz," as is a grand tradition in the internet. And, as an end-user? A little respect might be nice.
zxzax 5y ago
As far as I can see, the value seems to be in using code golfing as a form of artistic programming. Probably useless, but not any more so than your average video game, or theater performance, or art museum...
II2II 5y ago
Those who use Gemini find value in it. Their definition of value may be different. It may be expressed in terms of the type of community they wish to participate in, the type of environment they wish to expose themselves to, the hobbies they pursue, how they entertain themselves, or any other reason that keeps them returning. Painting people with negative stereotypes simply because they seek something different from their online experience is uncalled for. Nothing compels people to use Gemini aside from their own personal interest. Its imprint upon the world is so minuscule that it is impossible to complain of incidental impacts. Simply put, it will not affect the lives of those who choose to ignore it. Contrast that to the web, which is virtually impossible to escape while remaining functional in the modern world. And why paint it in terms of negatives? People tend to compare Gemini to a crippled version of the web simply because that's what most of the world uses, but is more accurate to claim it is a modernized version of Gopher. It simplifies linking to other documents. It is possible to reformat text for small screens. It adds a layer of security. These are all positives.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

It's funny and poignant to see this sincere discussion here, at the very heart of the commercial web

carapace 5y ago
Heh. It seems to me that the discussion here is just rehashing all the discussion on the Gemini mailing list from the past few years.

Someone 5y ago

Other products that “can’t emulate typography produced on a daily basis – often in a hurry – 150 years ago”, but that you may have heard of: Twitter, WhatsApp. Also, how well does html do multiple columns with text flowing between them nowadays? ⇒ I don’t think the original argument is a strong one.

thaunatos 5y ago
> Also, how well does html do multiple columns with text flowing between them nowadays? With the CSS property `columns`, this is pretty easy to do: https://jsfiddle.net/52j401rg/ https://jsfiddle.net/52j401rg/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/columns https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/columns

teucris 5y ago

The author’s response doesn’t really address the complaint in the post quoted. The complaint was that Gemini lacks basic utility. Intentionally making things that lack utility is a great way to express an idea, but to me that’s an art form or a statement, not a tool. Gemini is a communication tool. While it’s noble to make something that is difficult to extract value from, a tool has to serve a purpose. The complaints, to me, feel legitimate critiques for a communication tool. Whenever I venture into the Gemini-verse, I feel like I’m peeking into personal diaries left out at random. I am not a person to shy away from a good search for interesting information. But on Gemini, I don’t see a point in digging. That makes me feel like it’s still lacking as a communication tool.

alexwennerberg 5y ago
> that’s an art form or a statement, not a tool. (Author here) I would definitely view Gemini more along those lines. Gemini is an interesting space to inhabit and explore -- a space dramatically different than the modern web due to its design. That's the value in it for me!

aaron-santos 5y ago

> If your technology can’t emulate typography produced on a daily basis – often in a hurry – 150 years ago then your tech is rather limited. Just wait until Alex hears about illuminated manuscripts from the 13th century. Gemini's inability to depict historiated initials is an even bigger tragedy.

easterncalculus 5y ago

I'm glad to see this article and posts like the one mentioned because Gemini really doesn't make sense. It seems like a hobbyist project that people now are getting defensive about when questioned on the value of its spread and existence. Gemini misses the point. The problem with the web is Javascript, not italics. It's a good example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Animats 5y ago

Direct browser support for Markdown would accomplish many of the same goals.

Madeindjs 5y ago

I dislike that Gemini require an another web server and another web browser. Isn't Gemeni can be simplified to a convention that forbid CSS/JavaScript and allow only basic tags of HTML (<h1-6>, <p>, <a>, etc..)? IMO this could be a better move because this will use any performances improvement made on modern web stack (cache, compression, etc..).

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Yeah I was thinking that if the system just piggybacked on HTTP's Accept headers, it could be run on any common web hosting service. I could, for example, add a Gemini endpoint to my PHP site.

kixiQu 5y ago

To all: please consider reading the Gemini faq [1] before chiming in with impressions of the project. You definitely don't have to agree with the rationales, but the discussion is impoverished without understanding their angle on those decisions. (Esp. seeing a lot of people who might be interested by "2.5 Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?") [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

reanimus 5y ago

Gemini always seemed like more a political statement than a useful tool, imo

bawolff 5y ago

The gemini faq talks about not having any feature, intentional or unintentional that can be used for user tracking...and then talks about TLS client certificates being first class citizens. Guess im a bit confused on the design criteria.

yladiz 5y ago
Can TLS certificates in the way that Gemini uses them be used to track end users?
- bawolff 5y ago
  Presumably? I haven't read the gemini spec or know how they use them, but the entire point of a tls certificate (whether client or server) is to give a persistent identity that can't be faked. Edit: found the spec - https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html Sounds like they're passing the buck a bit to the client. Client can decide how long lived, so its up to the user if they want to use a long lived identity or a short lived one. Doesn't sound all that different from cookies to me. In old web browsers you were always prompted if you wanted to accept each and every cookie. Everyone clicked yes so web browsers stopped asking. This seems the same.

GuB-42 5y ago

The big problem I have with Gemini is TLS. That makes it way too complex and also breaks the ideal of a complete, unmoving spec since cyphers tend to change as weaknesses are found. It also requires certificate management with roots of trust, expiration dates, etc... You basically need libs, which is a problem on its own. TCP is also a bit of complexity but not as much, and it is not mandatory, unlike TLS. And now, since uselessness is the topic. Or more precisely, that Gemini can't be polluted like the web because it is useless, don't you think mandating the lack of encryption would make it even more "useless". I mean, really, why do people want https? Why do Google insist so much on https? The biggest reason is e-commerce. The secret you have that everyone wants to know is your credit card number, and more generally, everything that allows someone to make a transaction on your behalf. Really for most people, https protects the bank account. So, if you think that the commercial web is the enemy, making a protocol that is unsuitable for commerce can be an idea. I took the reasoning from the ham radio rule that bans encryption. Simply, it is a way to keep most commercial operations out and keep it an amateur thing.

fsiefken 5y ago

Sourcehut supports Gemini pages. Sourcehut sysop Drew DeVault has a Gemini presence as well. https://portal.drewdevault.com/x/srht.site https://portal.drewdevault.com/x/srht.site https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.htm...