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This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?"

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for. (Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek, very few people were online, and nobody cared about anything said online. Not anything technical.) You don't want JavaScript, videos, images, styles, or fonts? Don't use them. Nobody is going to come and force your site to have them. On the other hand, your site will load so fast that it won't feel remotely retro. ;) You can use a static builder (or slap one together that fits your needs) if you don't like hand-coding HTML. Though, really, basic HTML is dead simple for pages of text. If you want to go full 1994, set your robots.txt to block all search engines. Make it so people can only find your site by following links from the sites of the like-minded. Don't link out to anything that isn't a similar site. Boom, you've done everything Gemini does with off-the-shelf software, leaving you with more time to read and write. (I've seen the counter-arguments from Gemini boosters, but none are very convincing. A Dogme 95-esque approach to the web accomplishes everything interesting about Gemini.)

AstralStorm 5y ago
> Nobody is going to force you to use JavaScript. But they sure try. Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP. Images, videos and other embeds are fine, because they're clear siloes; it's easy to make sure the website degrades gracefully. JS is not, and fonts are not. These do not degrade gracefully. Neither do complex styles in CSS. Canvas does not degrade either. Gemini is a bit too simple to be really useful. What is needed is something closer to old HTML 2 before all the browser warfare, with a few small extras tossed in from later versions. Maybe with bit more of semantic format than representational.
- Santosh83 5y ago
  Are you sure fonts don't degrade gracefully? The font stack can always fallback to serif/sans-serif right? Icon fonts are a different beast though.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    I disable web fonts. That makes many sites very difficult to use. Yes, icon fonts are a part of that, but also the change in metrics messes up some layouts rather bad.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  Google AMP is five years old. Hardly the latest anything. And it's yet another thing you simply don't have to use.
- why_only_15 5y ago
  I don't understand the level of interest in degrading some people have. Really I don't understand any level at all. What percent of users are running something other than an auto-updating browser?
- maxwell 5y ago
  > Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP. I changed my default search engine from GSearch to DDG a couple years ago because of AMP, but it's now thankfully dead in the water, e.g. https://searchengineland.com/google-news-app-will-display-non-amp-content-and-send-readers-to-publisher-pages-374291 https://searchengineland.com/google-news-app-will-display-no... https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366242/amp-decelerates-few-firms-are-using-the-tool-hail.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366242/amp-de... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-amp-no-search-ranking-decline-31990.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-amp-no-search-ran...
mattlondon 5y ago
Non-american, non-white, and non-males were using the internet back in the early 90s too! Can't vouch for prior to that but there was at least one :) I think of it as more of a "childhood memories" type thing rather than a bias thing - just like for a child everything they see is novel and new and interesting to them because they've not encountered it before. The internet was the same for a lot of us in the early days because it was novel and new and interesting because we'd never seen or used anything like it before. Now people take it for granted and we're totally 100% used to it (and it has been commercialised sure), so it is not novel or new or exciting for many of us any more, and we wistfully look back on "the good old days" like we might do the same when we spent hours playing with lego or on an old 8-bit micro etc as a kid.
- krapp 5y ago
  Except the web of the 90s had quirky stylesheets and images and pages longer than a couple of paragraphs. Almost everything people miss about the old web is Considered Harmful on Gemini.
  - Semiapies 5y ago
    People in this context are talking early 90s, not mid-late 90s.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  I can vouch that nobody sees the word "almost".
soapdog 5y ago
Gemini is not about the pages without JS and stuff. Gemini for me and many other people is about having a specification that is simple enough that normal people can implement clients and servers from scratch and have fun doing it. You can keep the whole spec in your head. You can develop both clients and servers from scratch just by leveraging some network and TLS libraries. It is friendly to retrocomputers that are able to do TLS but not beefy enough to run the Web.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  If all people want to do is play with clients and servers, why all the noise about text and how awful the Web is?
abrazame 5y ago
> Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek As someone who doesn’t fit into that pigeon hole, and whose friends mostly don’t either, it’s so disheartening to read essentialist assumptions like these. We liked the Internet better back then too! You’re taking something that’s objectively good, and saying it’s associated with white people, and implying that’s bad. So not only do we collectively lose the objectively good thing (because it’s now guilty by association of racism - the greatest social crime of our day), but you’re also erasing non-white contributions to that good thing. It’s an own goal all round.
- Guthur 5y ago
  Is there something similar to Godwin's law for when white male comes up on internet discourse? If there isn't there should be :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Well as someone who doesn't fit into that pigeon hole either, but spent a bunch of time on Gemini in the beginning of Gemini (and I might have written something you use on Gemini lol), I disagree with you. A lot of Gemini really is just culture in-group signaling. There's nothing "essentially white, male, American geek" in there but it does harken back to the cultural trappings of the early internet which was largely white, male, and American. Moreover I don't see what's "objectively good" here, is it the gatekeeping of Gemini or is it the fact that Gemini is mostly just people writing about Gemini and digital minimalism?
- Semiapies 5y ago
  Ignoring that you're ignoring the "almost" in that sentence...What's the "objective good" in the retro-internet obsession? I was there, I enjoyed it, too, but there was no objective good to the gatekeeping, there was just a very small, blinkered culture that thought it would be able to enforce its standards on everyone who ever showed up. If anything, the objective good is that rather than a toy for people mostly at universities, we now have an internet that's a communications medium for most of the people on the planet.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
> Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers? If I am visiting a site I've never visited before, I have no guarantee what it will do or try to do until I load it/use it. Yes there are ways to control what sites do but the ways to block or manage them always seem to be changing and require keeping up on plugins, whitelists, extensions, which browser is better this week, which NewFeatureKit or TurningWebBrowserInToOSKit needs to be disabled or settings adjusted this time, etc. It's tiring. We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit. With Gemini, there's pretty much never going to be ads or trackers, because it's as physically impossible as it can be from a protocol standpoint. I can also tell people "install this Gemini browser and you're good" instead of having to explain how modern Internet properties seek to pervasively surveil everything and what needs to be done to prevent it.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit. We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently chosen a desire for ascetic, technical minimalism over accessibility. If those are the preferences, then it sounds a lot less like "inclusive Internet without this bullshit" and more like "our cool club where only the plain text kids hang out".
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    Gemini is really just anti-metadata in general. We don't even get anything resembling a Content-Length header because supporting delimiters can lead to extensibility which can lead to tracking mechanisms like cookies and ETags. So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text? I'm admittedly ignorant here because I don't have vision-related needs, but to me the fact that you can depend on a .GMI document to be text only would make it seem like screen or text reader software could easily handle it.

AstralStorm 5y ago

> Nobody is going to force you to use JavaScript. But they sure try. Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP. Images, videos and other embeds are fine, because they're clear siloes; it's easy to make sure the website degrades gracefully. JS is not, and fonts are not. These do not degrade gracefully. Neither do complex styles in CSS. Canvas does not degrade either. Gemini is a bit too simple to be really useful. What is needed is something closer to old HTML 2 before all the browser warfare, with a few small extras tossed in from later versions. Maybe with bit more of semantic format than representational.

Santosh83 5y ago
Are you sure fonts don't degrade gracefully? The font stack can always fallback to serif/sans-serif right? Icon fonts are a different beast though.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  I disable web fonts. That makes many sites very difficult to use. Yes, icon fonts are a part of that, but also the change in metrics messes up some layouts rather bad.
Semiapies 5y ago
Google AMP is five years old. Hardly the latest anything. And it's yet another thing you simply don't have to use.
why_only_15 5y ago
I don't understand the level of interest in degrading some people have. Really I don't understand any level at all. What percent of users are running something other than an auto-updating browser?
maxwell 5y ago
> Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP. I changed my default search engine from GSearch to DDG a couple years ago because of AMP, but it's now thankfully dead in the water, e.g. https://searchengineland.com/google-news-app-will-display-non-amp-content-and-send-readers-to-publisher-pages-374291 https://searchengineland.com/google-news-app-will-display-no... https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366242/amp-decelerates-few-firms-are-using-the-tool-hail.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366242/amp-de... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-amp-no-search-ranking-decline-31990.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-amp-no-search-ran...

mattlondon 5y ago

Non-american, non-white, and non-males were using the internet back in the early 90s too! Can't vouch for prior to that but there was at least one :) I think of it as more of a "childhood memories" type thing rather than a bias thing - just like for a child everything they see is novel and new and interesting to them because they've not encountered it before. The internet was the same for a lot of us in the early days because it was novel and new and interesting because we'd never seen or used anything like it before. Now people take it for granted and we're totally 100% used to it (and it has been commercialised sure), so it is not novel or new or exciting for many of us any more, and we wistfully look back on "the good old days" like we might do the same when we spent hours playing with lego or on an old 8-bit micro etc as a kid.

krapp 5y ago
Except the web of the 90s had quirky stylesheets and images and pages longer than a couple of paragraphs. Almost everything people miss about the old web is Considered Harmful on Gemini.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  People in this context are talking early 90s, not mid-late 90s.
Semiapies 5y ago
I can vouch that nobody sees the word "almost".

soapdog 5y ago

Gemini is not about the pages without JS and stuff. Gemini for me and many other people is about having a specification that is simple enough that normal people can implement clients and servers from scratch and have fun doing it. You can keep the whole spec in your head. You can develop both clients and servers from scratch just by leveraging some network and TLS libraries. It is friendly to retrocomputers that are able to do TLS but not beefy enough to run the Web.

Semiapies 5y ago
If all people want to do is play with clients and servers, why all the noise about text and how awful the Web is?

abrazame 5y ago

> Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek As someone who doesn’t fit into that pigeon hole, and whose friends mostly don’t either, it’s so disheartening to read essentialist assumptions like these. We liked the Internet better back then too! You’re taking something that’s objectively good, and saying it’s associated with white people, and implying that’s bad. So not only do we collectively lose the objectively good thing (because it’s now guilty by association of racism - the greatest social crime of our day), but you’re also erasing non-white contributions to that good thing. It’s an own goal all round.

Guthur 5y ago
Is there something similar to Godwin's law for when white male comes up on internet discourse? If there isn't there should be :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Well as someone who doesn't fit into that pigeon hole either, but spent a bunch of time on Gemini in the beginning of Gemini (and I might have written something you use on Gemini lol), I disagree with you. A lot of Gemini really is just culture in-group signaling. There's nothing "essentially white, male, American geek" in there but it does harken back to the cultural trappings of the early internet which was largely white, male, and American. Moreover I don't see what's "objectively good" here, is it the gatekeeping of Gemini or is it the fact that Gemini is mostly just people writing about Gemini and digital minimalism?
Semiapies 5y ago
Ignoring that you're ignoring the "almost" in that sentence...What's the "objective good" in the retro-internet obsession? I was there, I enjoyed it, too, but there was no objective good to the gatekeeping, there was just a very small, blinkered culture that thought it would be able to enforce its standards on everyone who ever showed up. If anything, the objective good is that rather than a toy for people mostly at universities, we now have an internet that's a communications medium for most of the people on the planet.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

> Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers? If I am visiting a site I've never visited before, I have no guarantee what it will do or try to do until I load it/use it. Yes there are ways to control what sites do but the ways to block or manage them always seem to be changing and require keeping up on plugins, whitelists, extensions, which browser is better this week, which NewFeatureKit or TurningWebBrowserInToOSKit needs to be disabled or settings adjusted this time, etc. It's tiring. We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit. With Gemini, there's pretty much never going to be ads or trackers, because it's as physically impossible as it can be from a protocol standpoint. I can also tell people "install this Gemini browser and you're good" instead of having to explain how modern Internet properties seek to pervasively surveil everything and what needs to be done to prevent it.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit. We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently chosen a desire for ascetic, technical minimalism over accessibility. If those are the preferences, then it sounds a lot less like "inclusive Internet without this bullshit" and more like "our cool club where only the plain text kids hang out".
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Gemini is really just anti-metadata in general. We don't even get anything resembling a Content-Length header because supporting delimiters can lead to extensibility which can lead to tracking mechanisms like cookies and ETags. So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text? I'm admittedly ignorant here because I don't have vision-related needs, but to me the fact that you can depend on a .GMI document to be text only would make it seem like screen or text reader software could easily handle it.