17 ms·

Gemini is Solutionism

148 points by johnjago 5y ago

sergiotapia 5y ago
Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Yep there would always be the temptation to say "well I need just one cookie" or "well I need just this bit of javascript" Gemini doesn't give you those options.
  - dopidopHN 5y ago
    It’s also make the protocol considerably easier. I read it in two small settings. It’s surprisingly digest and make you want to start implementing a server or a client for it.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    I think it's only a matter of time before Gemini does that. The moment it's actually used by people who aren't interested in the underlying tech, someone will fork the browser and include either video support or scripting of some kind. Or they'll say, maybe it should display PDFs too - and that will bring the JS engine in as well.
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      Gemini can play videos just fine already.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Exactly. It's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image. If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors. What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that? One answer is to publish over Gemini.
  - piaste 5y ago
    I wonder if instead of Minimal HTTP, it would have been more effective to create a Minimal ActivityPub instead.
    - iszomer 5y ago
      I think if you want to further limit yourself than Gemini yet maintain some of the semblance of the existing modern web, you can go the Beaker Browser [1] route. [1] https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
- wnolens 5y ago
  Right. I had never heard about Gemini before this thread. So after skimming, I read the Gemini FAQ, then went back and re-read the article. The author completely missed the point and began a technical discussion. Kind of similar to that dev you work with that gets psyched about a solution, and doesn't stop to ask "do we need to solve this problem?"
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  I think this is an interesting argument, but my question is why can't it just work in the browser I have with an extension? No matter what people say, modern websites with JS and HTML and such aren't going away. I can't just stick my head in the sand and only use this special browser since I use too many things that make my life better in meaningful ways that use the traditional protocols. Many of them wouldn't be possible using Gemini (I assume, I haven't dug in much). That means if I want to use Gemini I would have to add a whole other browser to my computer and switch between the two while browsing which is super annoying. At that point I just won't bother. What is the end game here? Do they want all websites to switch to Gemini? Do they expect people to use two browsers? Are they saying that anything that can't be built on Gemini should be a Native App?
  - akkartik 5y ago
    I use Firefox. When I click on a gemini:// link it opens it in Lagrange. Seems pretty seamless. If you're not going to install Lagrange, I'm doubtful that you're going to install an extension either. This isn't about you personally, it's a statistical judgment about the market segment you're signalling yourself to belong to. People reluctant to install native software are also unlikely to install extensions. Having a separate app provides some additional protection compared to an extension that can look over your shoulder at everything you browse. Lagrange runs in a separate process entirely, and it can only snoop on the Gemini websites I visit. Re endgame, see 1.6 at https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi Me, I go to Gemini (and Mastodon, and the tildeverse, and plan.cat, and twtxt, and, and..) precisely because it has no hope in hell of adoption. If someone's posting there they're intrinsically motivated[1]. That's the stuff I want to look at. When I'm in small pools like these I'm less legible[2] to marketers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic [2] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
  - immibis 5y ago
    It can, but someone has to write that extension first.
barakm 5y ago
You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based. Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Lagrange isn't terminal based.
  - zppln 5y ago
    And neither is Ariane for Android.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  > It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. > elitism (n.) the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society. where does this idea come from? why can't people make their own spaces in their own corners of the Internet without being considered "elitist?" is HN "elitist"? 4chan? Usenet? ZeroNet?
  - wmf 5y ago
    Text-only content is elitist ever since the masses started expecting everything to be video or at least have some stock images.
    - lvass 5y ago
      Healthy foods are elitist ever since the masses started expecting everything to be sugary, so let's not eat healthy.
    - piaste 5y ago
      Pictura est laicorum literatura, 1000 years later.
  - 5y ago
daveevad 5y ago
Super pedantic but you don't need to send the Host header either to get a response. I use the telnet trick often as debug step number one.
- latch 5y ago
  OP is correct. HTTP/1.1 requires the Host header (1). The client must send it, and the server must reject requests without it. Some implementations simply don't follow the standard. For example, you can test this on twitter.com, which appears to be correctly following the specification. (1) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4
  - thakoppno 5y ago
    > That’s the bare minimum that this server accepts in order for me to request the website from it. The example shown returns a 400 for me without a Host header.
    - latch 5y ago
      Exactly. Without a Host header, 400. With a Host header, 301 to https.
  - yardstick 5y ago
    OP is only correct if using HTTP/1.1 and not 1.0 or 0.9. I’ve done plenty of telnets using 1.0 without the need for the host header. Just depends on if the server is a dedicated server or running a bunch of hosts (and the default host isn’t the one you want).
    - daveevad 5y ago
      Connected to motherfuckingwebsite.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  - daveevad 5y ago
    My apologies I was being way too pedantic. You're obviously right about the standard and that some implementations do not follow the standard. I'll even admit complete defeat since I must have skipped over this part, "this server accepts." I was really just objecting to the phrasing of "bare minimum" largely because I'd encountered implementations that do not match specification. But also, the part, "for me to request the website from it" does not quite match the language of the rfc. Therefore, my argument has been reduced to "screaming into the void" is a way to request the website from a server.
elteto 5y ago
I wondered the same thing... why invent a whole new thing? Making a web browser capable of displaying the Internet circa 1999 is not trivial but it is far, far, far easier than building a modern one. Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.
- brimble 5y ago
  I think because the inevitable result of that is that you constantly land on broken pages, just by following links, even if you start in some kind of enthusiast area that caters to such a browser.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    You could mitigate that by only linking to pages that implement the HTML subset deemed valid. And instead of linking away to another domain, you could syndicate those pages on a centralized domain so to prevent loading dangerous or slow content on the open web. We could call it something like Accelerated Mobile Pages.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's about building an ecosystem. Its way easier to build a community of users and content which display on an 80 char terminal when the protocol only supports it and every link links to more content which follows the same restrictions. IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.
- dopidopHN 5y ago
  The spec of Gemini state that a Gemini web client should be writable as a weekend project for a experienced dev.
  - The_Colonel 5y ago
    Having this as a priority nicely demonstrates how dev-centric and user-ignorant this project is.
latch 5y ago
The post is a broad, and IMO, valid criticism. Though I'm not sure having a different protocol is a _huge_ problem. If Gemini ever got popular both backends and clients would add support. I think the real issue, and the OP touches on it, is the text/gemini format. There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. Specifically, I'm talking about inline-links (though that isn't the only issue). I wrote a server in elixir, and tried to convert Wikiversity's Introduction to Programming (1) both manually and automatically. I found the output unusable and couldn't come up with a case where I'd ever prefer/recommend it. (1) https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Programming https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Programming
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. That's kind of what I've concluded too. I like the mission of gemini (and I believe the web is fundamentally broken and unrepairable), but I do feel like text/gemini flings way too far in the opposite direction. It's not a new pattern, I see this all the time: thing X is too complex and bloated and user-hostile, let's make a suckless thing Y. Y is minimalistic to a fault. Making something that's too minimalistic or too complex is easy. Finding the right balance and making something that is small and simple yet still capable of covering wide use scenarios is an engineering challenge.. Since I agree with gemini's mission, I'm not going to complain too much about it. It's not exactly what I want, but if it encourages people to write content and deliver it in a form that is guaranteed not to have web's problems, I'm all for it, because I do stand to benefit from it.
captn3m0 5y ago
I wish browsers supported text/markdown.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  Which variant of Markdown would that implement? Would it allow embedded HTML (for tables and such) as the original Markdown implementation did?
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    Same as how browsers compete with new HTML tags and such - CommonMark + few extensions could be standardized) with others left to the browsers to decide. HTML inside markdown is anyway legal as per the standard, so anyone could use <table> for anything complicated anyway. Such an implementation would also lead to users having more control and say in how the web pages look (similar to Gemini), by letting you read most content across most websites in fonts, styles, and colors of your choosing. This aids a lot in accessibility as well.
    - hammyhavoc 5y ago
      Would love to see this happen.
eternityforest 5y ago
Having a new protocol has value for the same reason HAM does. You hope that the character of the content itself will be interesting enough to be it's own subculture. Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture. It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations. Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?
- gerikson 5y ago
  I'd start by checking out Antenna: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/ It's an aggregator of sorts, but with a bit of a twist. Clients, for the terminal I recommend Amfora https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora and Lagrange is a great GUI client https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: <title>'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux/Re-re-re-considered-harmful.gmi https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    > now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky Oops, what happened? Now that was short lived.. EDIT: apparently hardware failure
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    There is also a Usenet group, news:comp.infosystems.gemini.
knowledge-clay 5y ago
> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different, Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them. > Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  > Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin. The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".
chaganated 5y ago
akkartik 5y ago
I'm not yet sure how I feel about Gemini (I like inline links), but this post makes me think it's starting to gain some traction. It's past the "first they ignore it" and "then they laugh at it" phases and now into the "then they fight it" phase. Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)
- readthenotes1 5y ago
  You're saying Gemini is the Judean People's Front? A difference without a distinction?
  - akkartik 5y ago
    If you think the web sucks, stop equating people (not companies) building alternatives with Google and Facebook. I think OP is the Judean People's Front while Gemini is the People's Front of Judea. Or something. Who cares? Here's an example of the connotations the term "solutionism" has: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/09/evgeny-morozov-technology-solutionism-interview https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/09/evgeny-mo.... It does not apply here, to put it mildly.
- syntheticnature 5y ago
  I guess it depends on how big of a "they" is required -- and if this is an attack, not harsh laughter. That said, I think Gemini is intentionally designed to be ignored; an enclave or ghetto on the Internet, depending which connotations the speaker wants to have. Its success or failure will depend on its ability to have a self-sustaining community, which is interesting mainly in that discovering Gemini requires finding it via the web at the moment. I suppose there might be a Gemini-IRC connection, too; we will see if Gemini has IRC's longevity.
- piaste 5y ago
ecliptik 5y ago
Admittedly I up voted this not because I agree with it, but because I want more people talking about Gemini, both for and against it since it leads to healthy and constructive debate on a new technology.
dvt 5y ago
> The modern web sucks I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown. Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.
- cr__ 5y ago
  And Facebook tracks your grandma's internet activities and manipulates her emotional state for profit.
  - Permit 5y ago
    > manipulates her emotional state for profit. Can you share more on this? I've heard they conducted large-scale studies of emotional state[1], but I never heard about a link to profit before. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      They manipulate for engagement, more time on site, to show more ads.
      - Permit 5y ago
        If that is the extent of this line of reasoning then I guess I am in agreement with dvt. That doesn't seem "bad" to me in the least. I thought cr__ was sharing new information regarding the often criticized study I linked above.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It's not that they have a plan to abuse people for money. It's just that being opposite of boring gives them profit. Outrage brings engagement. Engagement brings time on the platform and ad clicks.
allanrbo 5y ago
If it was built on HTTP, there's a risk of a slippery slope type situation.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  It's not prevented by being its own protocol, only delayed. HTTP was pretty simple at the start, then it got popular and more features got added to satisfy more users. There is no law of nature or humans which prevents Gemini from being hijacked by others later if it becomes popular enough. And if it stays niche, then the current (developer-heavy) community can keep it as simple as they want.
- tlamponi 5y ago
  How so? It's not like the `application/json` content type suffered from it, why should a `text/gemini`?
barrikad 5y ago
There's something to be said about limits. Interesting things happen when you set limitations. The Oulipo group, made up of writers like Perec and Calvino, would intentionally set limits in order to spur creativity. What's the harm in having a web protocol like Gemini attempting to do the same thing? The modern web is bloated, captured, no longer uncharted land waiting to be explored. Why not refuse and set off into the waters of Gemini? What do you have to lose?
square_usual 5y ago
I agree with the author, but from a different direction. The Gemini community has this ethos that stripping away all the styling etc. makes the internet about "content" again. Setting aside for the moment that the definition that content = text is unnecessarily reductive (and insulting to other forms of content - is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content?), in my experience - people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols. The people whose content I most respect are writing into a blogger setup that hasn't changed for decades, or into Wordpress's editor that feels like it actively fights you when you want to write. They like making it look like they want it to, and they like having analytics or getting paid for their content with ads or subscriptions. And on the other hand, barring one notable exception I haven't found anybody in the gemini space whose content I found interesting in itself. (Of course, that's just personal opinion - you might find many more people in the gemini space interesting.) And the moment I realized that a significant portion of the content on the gemini space was about implementing a gemini reader, it hit me that it was pure solutionism. Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech! (I could also go on about how the idea that stripping content of styles or """fluff""" is the only way for readers to get it on their own terms. I use stylus to override the font on every website I visit - it didn't require reinventing the wheel for that!)
- duxup 5y ago
  The great thing about the web when I came along with was all the character, good, bad or otherwise that personal sites, even some corporate sites that people build had. GeoCities came along and things could be ugly, but it felt genuine. Even just background choices or ugly gifs… I miss the personal wonkiness and folks not afraid to make ugly sites. The race to ultra minimalism feels as cold as a Facebook profile, maybe more.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge I do miss these days too.
ryukafalz 5y ago
I don't often use Gemini, but here's the thing that I think this misses and that Gemini does well: If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast. Yes, I can use NoScript, uBlock Origin with comprehensive lists, etc. and start to approach that level of simplicity... but every other link I click will likely be broken in weird and wonderful ways. In Gemini, they all work (provided the page still exists, of course). I think there's some value in that.
- tlamponi 5y ago
  > If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast. With a `text/gemini` content type over HTTP/1.1 you could just use cURL, wget or fancier stuff like w3m/lynx and get the exact same benefits but would not need to install yet another internet facing tool that may even get things wrong security wise (even with simple stuff a possibility).
  - lmm 5y ago
    How would a text/gemini content type guarantee that links did not go to pages with those issues? And given that HTTP has content negotiation, how could you ever be assured that a given link goes to a text/gemini page?
    - boring_twenties 5y ago
      Tag the link with a flag, then have the user agent refuse to load the links if it comes back with any other content type.
octoberfranklin 5y ago
That fake blinking cursor is the web (at its worst).
RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
It seems to me like the author is experiencing how the web itself feels if you try to step off the browser upgrade treadmill or use an older computer. A website refuses HTTP and you don't have recent TLS certs? Tough luck, pal. This page dynamically loads content with JS? Buzz off, guy using Links. Can't pay your online bills or join a video chat because you aren't using Chrome? Get with the times, grandma, and surrender to the new flesh! There will come a point- and for some things we're already past it- where there is exactly one viable web browser, and it is controlled by a company that sells ads. This is why Gemini exists.
lvass 5y ago
The author isn't considering how lack of features can be useful. Just like the lack of gotos in a language allows you to make many assumptions about a program, Gemini lacks just about every mechanism for fingerprinting and tracking that's become an inherent risk of accessing web pages, hugely reducing surface area for attacks. Even lack of styling with every page looking about the same can be considered a feature, everything looks familiar and we aren't inconvenienced by bad design decisions.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Any cool places to hang out on Gemini? I've got a client for it and poked around a bit
- gerikson 5y ago
  Start on Antenna: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/
r3ndr 5y ago
Gemini's most distinguishing feature seems to be that it is considered feature complete. If everything goes as planned, even decades from now building a usable gemini client should be easily doable. Completely unlike web browsers which started off with fairly simple html but picked up a lot of bloat over the last few decades. This alone might make Gemini worth it.
nikisweeting 5y ago
For anyone confused thinking this was about the crypto exchange, it's talking about the Gemini web protocol: https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space
ranger_danger 5y ago
Why a new protocol? Because modern browsers are massive, and we need something much, much lighter that doesn't need to support HTML and such.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.
  - immibis 5y ago
    Congratulations, you've invented Gemini with HTTP syntax. Since it's incompatible anyway, why does it need to be HTTP syntax?
    - CyberRabbi 5y ago
      It wouldn’t be incompatible if it took advantage of the Accept header.
      - immibis 5y ago
        It pretty much would. You couldn't link to the HTTP-Markdown-Web from the HTTP-HTML-Web (normal browsers don't and won't support Markdown) and you couldn't link to the HTTP-HTML-Web from the HTTP-Markdown-Web (the Markdown browser doesn't and won't support HTML) (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
        CyberRabbi 5y ago
        I don’t think you fully understand what I’m proposing. You create a set of conventions that “Gemini compatible” websites conform to. This will allow your site to work with small Gemini-only browsers. Those conventions mostly amount to sending markdown for URLs when the user agent sends “accept: application/x-Gemini-markdown” (or whatever the mime type would be). Web servers send the markdown to Gemini user agents while they send normal html to browsers that don’t send the Accept header. To signify that the site is a “Gemini site” at the URL level you can create a convention that the url must end in “.gemini” e.g. https://foo.com/blog.gemini https://foo.com/blog.gemini > (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions) I don’t see how sending a different file based on an accept header is any more technically unrealistic than creating an entirely new technology stack.
j4yav 5y ago
My understanding was that making it difficult to connect to, in order to keep out people who wouldn’t/couldn’t meet the bar, was an intended benefit and not an accident (whether that’s a good idea or not is an exercise for the reader, but the premise of this article seems to assume that it wasn’t the intent.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dexwiz 5y ago
I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.
- PinkMilkshake 5y ago
  > something most English keyboards would not be able to type English language keyboards are how you type Japanese. Those keyboards you see with Katakana or Hiragana are rarely used in Japan, pretty much everyone uses romaji. And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space. ナイス！
  - lmm 5y ago
    > And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space. It's virtually impossible to set it up if you don't use a QWERTY layout. I have a horrible pile of hacks that more or less work for now, but are being removed in windows 11.
    - PinkMilkshake 5y ago
      Interesting! I had never tried. Do you know if the Google IME has the same issue?
      - lmm 5y ago
        No idea, I've never used a Google OS on a machine with a real keyboard.
        PinkMilkshake 5y ago
        I meant this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Japanese_Input https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Japanese_Input
jfax 5y ago
Gemini does not aim to replace HTTP, I don't understand why this article is talking about it like it is?
dusted 5y ago
Indeed, one could at least argue that gopher was a simpler protocol, gemini makes short work of that, too, and leaves it to be only an incompatible and less capable https protocol with some other convention for the markup. I entirely agree that there's no good reason not to use HTTP[s] as a transport for textual information, which is kinda what it's made to do anyway.. I'd argue against a gemini content-type, I'd get as far away from the association with gemini as possible. text/feather is a better content-type, it makes it clear that it's text, with a feather-light structure imposed on it.. That structure should probably be very little more than support for line breaks and hyperlinks.
sertraline 5y ago
>it certainly does not justify completely replacing existing infrastructure and standards that humans have mutually agreed upon. It does, it makes sense. These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web, it led us to corporate controlled Internet where few major websites aggregate 80% of the content. It led us to scroll-jacking, bot-driven, located behind firewalls and captchas websites where genuine users can't even log in or post anything. It is why we have to use browsers that are more complex than entire operating systems just to support everything that can be done over HTTP. It led us to monopolies on web browsing - how many pages of web standards you have to implement and comply with if you want to make your own browser, just to visit google dot com? And at any time and moment all your efforts can be interrupted by security researchers who would tell you that your browser is insecure and now you have to comply with hundreds of pages of security standards as well, all because of how much can be done over HTTP. You can't even host a simple website over just HTTP without somebody telling you that you have to use HTTPS, even if you don't need it, because why not? You'll have the green icon! And because of such monopolies, most websites also turned into "shells" that try to ruin your experience as much as possible so you go and download their app where they have more control without being restricted by browsers. And this, in turn, led most people going off the general web and staying inside their apps. Sure, you can make your app that throws away most of HTTP-based bloat, but then someone forks and makes it support some of the bloat because they like it that way, and then someone else adds a bit more, and we are back at it again. You can't just "go back" and strip everything from HTTP, entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history, because there is no other road history of HTTP can walk by.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  I'd say, web standards are an antipattern anyway. Look at this dark theme: https://randomnixfix.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/why-the-freebsd-desktop-and-my-linux-rant/ https://randomnixfix.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/why-the-freebs... should such things be supported? If not, how much effort would a browser implementation take?
  - forty 5y ago
    Enabling reader mode on my already existing Firefox web browser makes this page perfectly readable. So very low effort as it already exists :)
FrozenVoid 5y ago
What author hints at is a view of Gemini community as ideologically monolithic Internet Amish, refusing technology and standards because they're opposed to modern state of things: the opposing(author) view is monoculture of Hypertext Web subjugating all protocols will eventually dominate due user-friendly and flexible nature of web stacks. Its obvious Gemini isn't a tech solution but a rebellion against corporate web dominance that intentionally cripples web experience for greater user control, but author tries to compare it with familiar web sub-formats that are characteristics of content: Gemini isn't about content, its a form of interaction that prescribes certain limits that Internet Amish will feel comfortable with, without introducing too much overhead(like Tor and I2P).
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  The problem with analogies is that they are contextual.
rcarmo 5y ago
I went down the Gemini rabbit hole last week (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/17/0800 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/17/0800, and even coded my own minimalist server for it) and tend to agree that both its protocol and markup are oversimplified technical solutions in search of a problem, although I wouldn’t cast it so harshly. It does feel like escapism/subculture of sorts, and I do believe that retreat from the Web is one of the underlying motivations, but (maintaining a relatively minimalist Markdown-backed site myself) I agree that there are no real technical reasons for it to exist (even Markdown support is something that is relatively easy to agree upon across browsers). What I do like about it is the Lagrange browser, and the extremely legible reading experience—-I consume most of my content via RSS feeds and Reader Mode on websites I visit frequently, and I like the uniformity and predictability of the layout, as well as the lack of ads and distractions. I’d be happy enough if Lagrange’s unfettered visual style became a sort of “forced Reader mode” in standard browsers…
forty 5y ago
I think the author is analyzing Gemini from a technical / engineering perspective, and of course, it doesn't make any sense. I think Gemini lack of compatibility with the Web is its main feature, and I think people using Gemini want to create a separate new "community". The spirit is "we lost the web, it was taken over by corporate interests, let's accept it, leave it and create our new thing" (you can replace "corporate interests" by "normies" for some people I'm sure). I think this is all fine, creating new communities/clubs/whatever when you are not happy with existing ones is good, maybe you'll be alone in it, maybe not, good for you. I think the main problem I see here is that, if I understood properly, a Gemini link was shared on a web page. I don't think it is okay. You want to have your own private club, you got it. But please leave other clubs alone. It's perfectly okay that you don't want to communicate with me. But then don't.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Why couldn't one simply build on top of existing HTTP infrastructure, throw away all the baggage and instead implement a new Content-Type, which existing browsers then could parse?" Because escaping the annoyances of the "modern web" may require escaping from the "modern browser". The changes users want to "modern browsers" will never be made. The vendors of these programs do not answer to users. They answer to web developers and advertisers. These are large, complex, insecure programs usually controlled by organisations that seek to profit from online advertising. The advertising focus leads to complex web pages. Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. (NB. Not "most", but "some".) Gemini, because of its limitations, allows users to retrieve resources without the need for one of these "modern browser" programs. If a new Content-Type was added to HTTP, what is the likelihood that other parties outside the "modern web browser" cabal would write small, simple, alternative browsers, e.g., aimed only at this Content-Type. Look at the market share, i.e., available selection, of web browsers. It is not diverse. Whereas, writing a Gemini client is dead simple. A Gemini browser cabal where users have only a few choices and they are each controlled by corporations is unlikely. Asking web developers to "please make simpler web pages, thanks", when the "modern browser" allows for complex pages and integration of advertising is not a succesful course of action. Most of these web developers answer to advertisers or to employers who answer to advertisers. They are not going to ditch the user annoyances, they are going to seek profits. Gemini seems to address this problem by making advertising difficult. Without the "modern browser", the possibilities for advertising are limited. Similarly, asking web users to "please use a text-only browser", e.g., Links, when so many web pages try to use "modern" browser features that enable complex web pages is probably not a successful strategy for many users either. As a long-time Links user, that strategy has worked for me, though. The only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It should be optional not mandatory.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. And yet most of these users don't use lynx... > Only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. If you're only hosting 1 site, isn't the privacy leak negligible because there is 1:1 mapping from ip to domain so an attacker caneasily determine it. Besides, in a system playing fast and loose with pki, its more like a do not disturb sign than an actual lock.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bawolff 5y ago
Gemini is so silly. The logic is basically as follows: - people are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular. - instead lets make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. But people have to voluntarily use our system. For some reason people will use gemini voluntarily even though they refused to voluntarily use the web in a way we approve of in the first place.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  - People are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular. Some do but it's impossible to divine it ahead of time before you follow a link and see what horrors lie behind. - Instead let's make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. People have to voluntarily use our system. By virtue of having their content in our system, our users are guaranteed a comfortable experience.
- _heimdall 5y ago
  I went down the Gemini rabbit hole 6 or 8 months ago and didn't really understand the solution it offered, but you're really missing the point here. The idea isn't that consumers are using the web in a way that is disliked. The web is run by and for large corporations legally bound to do what is best for shareholders. The web allows those corporations to take advantage of consumers in ways that the average user doesn't understand and often wouldn't knowingly consent to, and in the process opens the door to entire classes of vulnerabilities that wouldn't otherwise exist. Gemini may include a few unpopular assumptions and limitations, but a consumer never has to worry about any content on Gemini being vulnerable to script injections, malicious spyware, or site silently mining crypto on your hardware. Tracking is still technically possible, as mentioned in the OP article, but in a very limited sense and only really at the level of page requests. Gemini may be an over correction, but it at least starts (or continues) the conversation of whether a limited feature set is the most effective way to fix so many of the problems on the web today.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Imagine thinking that everything the billionaire-owned social media platforms choose to do is "popular" just because they do it.
foxfluff 5y ago
> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place, before this one collapses. The implication being that the web can be changed? I don't believe that, I believe the web is broken and it's only getting worse by the day. I'm not going to discourage you from trying though. > If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website [..] > If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it [..] Sorry, these are not answers for me as a user. When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra. And I'm also guaranteed not to have to play whack-a-mole with ublock/umatrix trying to make the actual fucking content somehow load. That's where the value is! "In theory, someone could make a nice website. Some actually do" is nice but it does nothing for my browsing experience in general, because the next link is going to be crap again.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I haven't (consciously) heard of this Gemini thing before, but: > I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, ... I guarantee this will only be true until it becomes popular enough to be a juicy target for the more - uhm - "business-oriented" people, it's not because of a restricted feature set. Creating a technology which is intentionally uninteresting to business is an interesting angle of course which I can get behind ;)
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Now tell the business people you can't display images and can't tell apart bots from "real people" on Gemini. They'll much prefer to keep their ads on the web. Being uninteresting to business is indeed a feature not a bug, but i agree with much of the author's criticism of gemini reinventing a square wheel: it's fun but a modern web subset would probably be easier to learn for many people while keeping backwards-compat with the rest of the world.
    - shuntress 5y ago
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
This post made me pretty interested in gemini. Since there are apparently a few users here: What server would you recommend to get started? Any small tutorials on setting up a gemini site? Any links to gemini sites (maybe your own) you want to share?
- nurb 5y ago
  There is a few gemini links on awesome-genini list. I haven't tried them out, but usually, awesome-* lists are good starting points. https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
    Thanks!
- reidrac 5y ago
  This is a good resource: http://geminiquickst.art/ http://geminiquickst.art/
robalni 5y ago
> The question here shouldn’t be why not to use a subset of HTTP and HTML, but rather, why not build on top of HTTP with a different markup layer other than HTML. We have APIs using HTTP with JSON instead of HTML, for example. As you can read in the Gemini FAQ, the reason that Gemini is not compatible with HTTP is that it should be possible to know that when you browse Gemini content, you will stay in gemini content. If Gemini were compatible with HTTP, then when you make a Gemini website, you know that many people who use it probably are using HTTP browsers, so it will be easier to mix Gemini with HTTP links which means that Gemini users will be more exposed to the type of content that they were trying to avoid by using Gemini. If Gemini instead is incompatible with HTTP, it will be harder for site owners to put a HTTP link on their Gemini site because they don't know how the user's client will handle that. Maybe the best solution could have been something that makes it easy to get in but not as easy to get out. I mean something like it could be possible to have a HTTP link to a Gemini site that would work in all browsers, but that Gemini site could not have a HTTP link. I just don't know how you would make that.
- _heimdall 5y ago
  Is there actually a good way for Gemini as a protocol to make linking to an HTTP site harder? I don't think the protocol actually limits the type of link on a Gemini page, and if I click on an HTTP link in an app my OS will just pop it up in a web browser without a problem. Yes I'd know the app changed, but I'm not sure that would really help guard me from following a link to the current web
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    It is common for Gemini clients to represent HTTP links differently from Gemini or Gopher links, so the user can make an informed choice before clicking.
akagusu 5y ago
I think people just want something to rant about. Gemini folks maintain Gemini for themselves using their own hardware and their own time, so I think they can do whatever they think its best for them. If they want to strip HTTP and remove all cool features it has, it's their problem, not ours. If they want to treat content as text only, again, it's their problem, not ours. If they want to publish their content as Gemini only, it's their content, not ours. If they want to bikeshedding about internet protocols, it's their time, not ours. Now, about Gemini folks being elitists and intentionally excluding people with their protocol, take a minute to think about what tech companies are doing. Tech companies and many other companies that rely heavily on tech are making our society dependent more and more on online services, selling all kind of products and services that need an internet connection to work, even for basic features. In a world where half of population does not have internet connection, and geek folks feel excluded by a protocol just because they don't like it, how can we name what tech companies are doing, if it is not elitism and exclusion?
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Tech companies will straight up ban you for unspecified reasons determined by some algorithm no one understands, with no recourse. It doesn't get any more "exclusionary" than that.
  - krapp 5y ago
    "tech companies" are not a protocol, nor are they a network built on that protocol, so the comparison here is specious at best. HTTP doesn't ban anyone, nor does TCP/IP nor does HTML, the internet or the web.
  - csb6 5y ago
    What does that have to do with the http protocol?
soapdog 5y ago
I just wrote a "Gemini is a little gem"[1] inspired by the OP article. I think that most criticism of Gemini kinda misses some important aspects of the ecosystem and ethos behind the protocol. [1]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html
ajioasfnokal 5y ago
I think a lot of the hostility people have towards Gemini comes from the frustration they have when they consider the absolutely massive scale of the modern web. Can a community of FOSS activists really fit the square peg of the modern web into the round hole of user-friendliness? Probably not. And I think on some level they understand this. Will governments around the world force user friendliness on major tech companies? Maybe, but probably not to the extent that satisfies us. Browsers are a natural monopoly. The reason is scale. Modern browsers are just too fucking big. Bob from Seattle isn't taking down Google with his neato "classic browsing experience". Nobody uses Bob's browser. So how do you rid the web of its surveillance scripts, telemetry-filled browsers, bad UX decisions, unnecessary bloat, manipulative algorithms and lowest-common-denominator pandering? Well, Gemini says you don't. This is where people get red in the face. How could you possibly give up the good fight!? Just visit websites that aren't trash! Well, sure. I do visit blogs that treat me well, but there's a reason most of the web is garbage. Because garbage makes money. Individual consumer decisions make up an aggregate of consumption behavior that shifts the market towards certain development patterns. "Surveillance capitalism" could also be called "you get unlimited entertainment for free, and in exchange I keep the receipts" capitalism. That's a pretty good deal for most people. And that's why the business model keeps getting copied. It's scalable, popular, practical, and yields the highest number of consumers of your product. It would literally be irrational for a business NOT to do this. When you block 30 trackers on someone's recipe page, you're taking a square peg and trying to force it into a round hole. That isn't a recipe page, but a tracking page that happens to have a recipe on it. Making it "work" is contrary to its intended purpose. So Gemini basically asks the question "what if we made a protocol that is architecturally predisposed to being user-friendly?" Gemini is a thought experiment in making a tool that's for a particular thing, for a particular group of likeminded people. What if instead of accepting dependancy on a browser duopoly, the protocol allowed anyone to hack up a browser in an afternoon? What if the protocol was designed to make surveillance capitalism an impossible business model? What if instead of trying to turn the corporate web into FOSSweb and bringing everyone into web utopia, developers created their own web that caters to user-friendly experiences for the niche minority of people who actually care about all that high-minded moralizing? So is Gemini useless? Maybe for you. But I found interesting blogs and I use the Lagrange client, which is very pretty. I enjoy reading peoples' thoughts on philosophy, economics, science, environmentalism, all kinds of things. And for the first time in decades, I feel like I'm actually surfing the web again, as I browse feed aggregators and click on random links, digging through post after post on all kinds of cool things. And it feels like a relaxing break from having to worry about what scripts may be on the sites I browse. I just click and go. Will Gemini show me 4k videos of puppies being carried around in strollers at the park? No. Gemini will never fill that part of my browsing habits. But does it have to? Consumers have become so domesticated in their mindset that one tool has to do it all. Once the tool turns out to work against you, you find yourself choosing between living in modern society or becoming a hermit. There is value in letting a hammer just be a hammer, and not trying to tape a saw on top of it.

148 points by johnjago 5y ago

Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Yep there would always be the temptation to say "well I need just one cookie" or "well I need just this bit of javascript" Gemini doesn't give you those options.
- dopidopHN 5y ago
  It’s also make the protocol considerably easier. I read it in two small settings. It’s surprisingly digest and make you want to start implementing a server or a client for it.
- viraptor 5y ago
  I think it's only a matter of time before Gemini does that. The moment it's actually used by people who aren't interested in the underlying tech, someone will fork the browser and include either video support or scripting of some kind. Or they'll say, maybe it should display PDFs too - and that will bring the JS engine in as well.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Gemini can play videos just fine already.
DarylZero 5y ago
Exactly. It's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image. If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors. What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that? One answer is to publish over Gemini.
- piaste 5y ago
  I wonder if instead of Minimal HTTP, it would have been more effective to create a Minimal ActivityPub instead.
  - iszomer 5y ago
    I think if you want to further limit yourself than Gemini yet maintain some of the semblance of the existing modern web, you can go the Beaker Browser [1] route. [1] https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
wnolens 5y ago
Right. I had never heard about Gemini before this thread. So after skimming, I read the Gemini FAQ, then went back and re-read the article. The author completely missed the point and began a technical discussion. Kind of similar to that dev you work with that gets psyched about a solution, and doesn't stop to ask "do we need to solve this problem?"
rPlayer6554 5y ago
I think this is an interesting argument, but my question is why can't it just work in the browser I have with an extension? No matter what people say, modern websites with JS and HTML and such aren't going away. I can't just stick my head in the sand and only use this special browser since I use too many things that make my life better in meaningful ways that use the traditional protocols. Many of them wouldn't be possible using Gemini (I assume, I haven't dug in much). That means if I want to use Gemini I would have to add a whole other browser to my computer and switch between the two while browsing which is super annoying. At that point I just won't bother. What is the end game here? Do they want all websites to switch to Gemini? Do they expect people to use two browsers? Are they saying that anything that can't be built on Gemini should be a Native App?
- akkartik 5y ago
  I use Firefox. When I click on a gemini:// link it opens it in Lagrange. Seems pretty seamless. If you're not going to install Lagrange, I'm doubtful that you're going to install an extension either. This isn't about you personally, it's a statistical judgment about the market segment you're signalling yourself to belong to. People reluctant to install native software are also unlikely to install extensions. Having a separate app provides some additional protection compared to an extension that can look over your shoulder at everything you browse. Lagrange runs in a separate process entirely, and it can only snoop on the Gemini websites I visit. Re endgame, see 1.6 at https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi Me, I go to Gemini (and Mastodon, and the tildeverse, and plan.cat, and twtxt, and, and..) precisely because it has no hope in hell of adoption. If someone's posting there they're intrinsically motivated[1]. That's the stuff I want to look at. When I'm in small pools like these I'm less legible[2] to marketers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic [2] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
- immibis 5y ago
  It can, but someone has to write that extension first.

barakm 5y ago

You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based. Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.

DarylZero 5y ago
Lagrange isn't terminal based.
- zppln 5y ago
  And neither is Ariane for Android.
adamrezich 5y ago
> It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. > elitism (n.) the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society. where does this idea come from? why can't people make their own spaces in their own corners of the Internet without being considered "elitist?" is HN "elitist"? 4chan? Usenet? ZeroNet?
- wmf 5y ago
  Text-only content is elitist ever since the masses started expecting everything to be video or at least have some stock images.
  - lvass 5y ago
    Healthy foods are elitist ever since the masses started expecting everything to be sugary, so let's not eat healthy.
  - piaste 5y ago
    Pictura est laicorum literatura, 1000 years later.
- 5y ago

daveevad 5y ago

Super pedantic but you don't need to send the Host header either to get a response. I use the telnet trick often as debug step number one.

latch 5y ago
OP is correct. HTTP/1.1 requires the Host header (1). The client must send it, and the server must reject requests without it. Some implementations simply don't follow the standard. For example, you can test this on twitter.com, which appears to be correctly following the specification. (1) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4
- thakoppno 5y ago
  > That’s the bare minimum that this server accepts in order for me to request the website from it. The example shown returns a 400 for me without a Host header.
  - latch 5y ago
    Exactly. Without a Host header, 400. With a Host header, 301 to https.
- yardstick 5y ago
  OP is only correct if using HTTP/1.1 and not 1.0 or 0.9. I’ve done plenty of telnets using 1.0 without the need for the host header. Just depends on if the server is a dedicated server or running a bunch of hosts (and the default host isn’t the one you want).
  - daveevad 5y ago
    Connected to motherfuckingwebsite.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
- daveevad 5y ago
  My apologies I was being way too pedantic. You're obviously right about the standard and that some implementations do not follow the standard. I'll even admit complete defeat since I must have skipped over this part, "this server accepts." I was really just objecting to the phrasing of "bare minimum" largely because I'd encountered implementations that do not match specification. But also, the part, "for me to request the website from it" does not quite match the language of the rfc. Therefore, my argument has been reduced to "screaming into the void" is a way to request the website from a server.

elteto 5y ago

I wondered the same thing... why invent a whole new thing? Making a web browser capable of displaying the Internet circa 1999 is not trivial but it is far, far, far easier than building a modern one. Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.

brimble 5y ago
I think because the inevitable result of that is that you constantly land on broken pages, just by following links, even if you start in some kind of enthusiast area that caters to such a browser.
- eloisius 5y ago
  You could mitigate that by only linking to pages that implement the HTML subset deemed valid. And instead of linking away to another domain, you could syndicate those pages on a centralized domain so to prevent loading dangerous or slow content on the open web. We could call it something like Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Gigachad 5y ago
It's about building an ecosystem. Its way easier to build a community of users and content which display on an 80 char terminal when the protocol only supports it and every link links to more content which follows the same restrictions. IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.
dopidopHN 5y ago
The spec of Gemini state that a Gemini web client should be writable as a weekend project for a experienced dev.
- The_Colonel 5y ago
  Having this as a priority nicely demonstrates how dev-centric and user-ignorant this project is.

latch 5y ago

The post is a broad, and IMO, valid criticism. Though I'm not sure having a different protocol is a _huge_ problem. If Gemini ever got popular both backends and clients would add support. I think the real issue, and the OP touches on it, is the text/gemini format. There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. Specifically, I'm talking about inline-links (though that isn't the only issue). I wrote a server in elixir, and tried to convert Wikiversity's Introduction to Programming (1) both manually and automatically. I found the output unusable and couldn't come up with a case where I'd ever prefer/recommend it. (1) https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Programming https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Programming

foxfluff 5y ago
> There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. That's kind of what I've concluded too. I like the mission of gemini (and I believe the web is fundamentally broken and unrepairable), but I do feel like text/gemini flings way too far in the opposite direction. It's not a new pattern, I see this all the time: thing X is too complex and bloated and user-hostile, let's make a suckless thing Y. Y is minimalistic to a fault. Making something that's too minimalistic or too complex is easy. Finding the right balance and making something that is small and simple yet still capable of covering wide use scenarios is an engineering challenge.. Since I agree with gemini's mission, I'm not going to complain too much about it. It's not exactly what I want, but if it encourages people to write content and deliver it in a form that is guaranteed not to have web's problems, I'm all for it, because I do stand to benefit from it.

captn3m0 5y ago

I wish browsers supported text/markdown.

KerrAvon 5y ago
Which variant of Markdown would that implement? Would it allow embedded HTML (for tables and such) as the original Markdown implementation did?
- captn3m0 5y ago
  Same as how browsers compete with new HTML tags and such - CommonMark + few extensions could be standardized) with others left to the browsers to decide. HTML inside markdown is anyway legal as per the standard, so anyone could use <table> for anything complicated anyway. Such an implementation would also lead to users having more control and say in how the web pages look (similar to Gemini), by letting you read most content across most websites in fonts, styles, and colors of your choosing. This aids a lot in accessibility as well.
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    Would love to see this happen.

eternityforest 5y ago

Having a new protocol has value for the same reason HAM does. You hope that the character of the content itself will be interesting enough to be it's own subculture. Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture. It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations. Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?

gerikson 5y ago
I'd start by checking out Antenna: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/ It's an aggregator of sorts, but with a bit of a twist. Clients, for the terminal I recommend Amfora https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora and Lagrange is a great GUI client https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: <title>'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux/Re-re-re-considered-harmful.gmi https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky Oops, what happened? Now that was short lived.. EDIT: apparently hardware failure
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  There is also a Usenet group, news:comp.infosystems.gemini.

knowledge-clay 5y ago

> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different, Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them. > Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.

systemvoltage 5y ago
> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin. The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".

chaganated 5y ago

akkartik 5y ago

I'm not yet sure how I feel about Gemini (I like inline links), but this post makes me think it's starting to gain some traction. It's past the "first they ignore it" and "then they laugh at it" phases and now into the "then they fight it" phase. Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)

readthenotes1 5y ago
You're saying Gemini is the Judean People's Front? A difference without a distinction?
- akkartik 5y ago
  If you think the web sucks, stop equating people (not companies) building alternatives with Google and Facebook. I think OP is the Judean People's Front while Gemini is the People's Front of Judea. Or something. Who cares? Here's an example of the connotations the term "solutionism" has: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/09/evgeny-morozov-technology-solutionism-interview https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/09/evgeny-mo.... It does not apply here, to put it mildly.
syntheticnature 5y ago
I guess it depends on how big of a "they" is required -- and if this is an attack, not harsh laughter. That said, I think Gemini is intentionally designed to be ignored; an enclave or ghetto on the Internet, depending which connotations the speaker wants to have. Its success or failure will depend on its ability to have a self-sustaining community, which is interesting mainly in that discovering Gemini requires finding it via the web at the moment. I suppose there might be a Gemini-IRC connection, too; we will see if Gemini has IRC's longevity.
piaste 5y ago

ecliptik 5y ago

Admittedly I up voted this not because I agree with it, but because I want more people talking about Gemini, both for and against it since it leads to healthy and constructive debate on a new technology.

dvt 5y ago

> The modern web sucks I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown. Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.

cr__ 5y ago
And Facebook tracks your grandma's internet activities and manipulates her emotional state for profit.
- Permit 5y ago
  > manipulates her emotional state for profit. Can you share more on this? I've heard they conducted large-scale studies of emotional state[1], but I never heard about a link to profit before. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    They manipulate for engagement, more time on site, to show more ads.
    - Permit 5y ago
      If that is the extent of this line of reasoning then I guess I am in agreement with dvt. That doesn't seem "bad" to me in the least. I thought cr__ was sharing new information regarding the often criticized study I linked above.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    It's not that they have a plan to abuse people for money. It's just that being opposite of boring gives them profit. Outrage brings engagement. Engagement brings time on the platform and ad clicks.

allanrbo 5y ago

If it was built on HTTP, there's a risk of a slippery slope type situation.

Jtsummers 5y ago
It's not prevented by being its own protocol, only delayed. HTTP was pretty simple at the start, then it got popular and more features got added to satisfy more users. There is no law of nature or humans which prevents Gemini from being hijacked by others later if it becomes popular enough. And if it stays niche, then the current (developer-heavy) community can keep it as simple as they want.
tlamponi 5y ago
How so? It's not like the `application/json` content type suffered from it, why should a `text/gemini`?

barrikad 5y ago

There's something to be said about limits. Interesting things happen when you set limitations. The Oulipo group, made up of writers like Perec and Calvino, would intentionally set limits in order to spur creativity. What's the harm in having a web protocol like Gemini attempting to do the same thing? The modern web is bloated, captured, no longer uncharted land waiting to be explored. Why not refuse and set off into the waters of Gemini? What do you have to lose?

square_usual 5y ago

I agree with the author, but from a different direction. The Gemini community has this ethos that stripping away all the styling etc. makes the internet about "content" again. Setting aside for the moment that the definition that content = text is unnecessarily reductive (and insulting to other forms of content - is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content?), in my experience - people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols. The people whose content I most respect are writing into a blogger setup that hasn't changed for decades, or into Wordpress's editor that feels like it actively fights you when you want to write. They like making it look like they want it to, and they like having analytics or getting paid for their content with ads or subscriptions. And on the other hand, barring one notable exception I haven't found anybody in the gemini space whose content I found interesting in itself. (Of course, that's just personal opinion - you might find many more people in the gemini space interesting.) And the moment I realized that a significant portion of the content on the gemini space was about implementing a gemini reader, it hit me that it was pure solutionism. Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech! (I could also go on about how the idea that stripping content of styles or """fluff""" is the only way for readers to get it on their own terms. I use stylus to override the font on every website I visit - it didn't require reinventing the wheel for that!)

duxup 5y ago
The great thing about the web when I came along with was all the character, good, bad or otherwise that personal sites, even some corporate sites that people build had. GeoCities came along and things could be ugly, but it felt genuine. Even just background choices or ugly gifs… I miss the personal wonkiness and folks not afraid to make ugly sites. The race to ultra minimalism feels as cold as a Facebook profile, maybe more.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge I do miss these days too.

ryukafalz 5y ago

I don't often use Gemini, but here's the thing that I think this misses and that Gemini does well: If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast. Yes, I can use NoScript, uBlock Origin with comprehensive lists, etc. and start to approach that level of simplicity... but every other link I click will likely be broken in weird and wonderful ways. In Gemini, they all work (provided the page still exists, of course). I think there's some value in that.

tlamponi 5y ago
> If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast. With a `text/gemini` content type over HTTP/1.1 you could just use cURL, wget or fancier stuff like w3m/lynx and get the exact same benefits but would not need to install yet another internet facing tool that may even get things wrong security wise (even with simple stuff a possibility).
- lmm 5y ago
  How would a text/gemini content type guarantee that links did not go to pages with those issues? And given that HTTP has content negotiation, how could you ever be assured that a given link goes to a text/gemini page?
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    Tag the link with a flag, then have the user agent refuse to load the links if it comes back with any other content type.

octoberfranklin 5y ago

That fake blinking cursor is the web (at its worst).

RodgerTheGreat 5y ago

It seems to me like the author is experiencing how the web itself feels if you try to step off the browser upgrade treadmill or use an older computer. A website refuses HTTP and you don't have recent TLS certs? Tough luck, pal. This page dynamically loads content with JS? Buzz off, guy using Links. Can't pay your online bills or join a video chat because you aren't using Chrome? Get with the times, grandma, and surrender to the new flesh! There will come a point- and for some things we're already past it- where there is exactly one viable web browser, and it is controlled by a company that sells ads. This is why Gemini exists.

lvass 5y ago

The author isn't considering how lack of features can be useful. Just like the lack of gotos in a language allows you to make many assumptions about a program, Gemini lacks just about every mechanism for fingerprinting and tracking that's become an inherent risk of accessing web pages, hugely reducing surface area for attacks. Even lack of styling with every page looking about the same can be considered a feature, everything looks familiar and we aren't inconvenienced by bad design decisions.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

Any cool places to hang out on Gemini? I've got a client for it and poked around a bit

gerikson 5y ago
Start on Antenna: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/

r3ndr 5y ago

Gemini's most distinguishing feature seems to be that it is considered feature complete. If everything goes as planned, even decades from now building a usable gemini client should be easily doable. Completely unlike web browsers which started off with fairly simple html but picked up a lot of bloat over the last few decades. This alone might make Gemini worth it.

nikisweeting 5y ago

For anyone confused thinking this was about the crypto exchange, it's talking about the Gemini web protocol: https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space

ranger_danger 5y ago

Why a new protocol? Because modern browsers are massive, and we need something much, much lighter that doesn't need to support HTML and such.

CyberRabbi 5y ago
You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.
- immibis 5y ago
  Congratulations, you've invented Gemini with HTTP syntax. Since it's incompatible anyway, why does it need to be HTTP syntax?
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    It wouldn’t be incompatible if it took advantage of the Accept header.
    - immibis 5y ago
      It pretty much would. You couldn't link to the HTTP-Markdown-Web from the HTTP-HTML-Web (normal browsers don't and won't support Markdown) and you couldn't link to the HTTP-HTML-Web from the HTTP-Markdown-Web (the Markdown browser doesn't and won't support HTML) (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions)
      - CyberRabbi 5y ago
        I don’t think you fully understand what I’m proposing. You create a set of conventions that “Gemini compatible” websites conform to. This will allow your site to work with small Gemini-only browsers. Those conventions mostly amount to sending markdown for URLs when the user agent sends “accept: application/x-Gemini-markdown” (or whatever the mime type would be). Web servers send the markdown to Gemini user agents while they send normal html to browsers that don’t send the Accept header. To signify that the site is a “Gemini site” at the URL level you can create a convention that the url must end in “.gemini” e.g. https://foo.com/blog.gemini https://foo.com/blog.gemini > (Almost nobody would vary the response based on the Accept header. Besides, if they did, you might as well just set an X-No-Ads-Please header and send HTML in both versions) I don’t see how sending a different file based on an accept header is any more technically unrealistic than creating an entirely new technology stack.

j4yav 5y ago

My understanding was that making it difficult to connect to, in order to keep out people who wouldn’t/couldn’t meet the bar, was an intended benefit and not an accident (whether that’s a good idea or not is an exercise for the reader, but the premise of this article seems to assume that it wasn’t the intent.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dexwiz 5y ago

I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.

PinkMilkshake 5y ago
> something most English keyboards would not be able to type English language keyboards are how you type Japanese. Those keyboards you see with Katakana or Hiragana are rarely used in Japan, pretty much everyone uses romaji. And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space. ナイス！
- lmm 5y ago
  > And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space. It's virtually impossible to set it up if you don't use a QWERTY layout. I have a horrible pile of hacks that more or less work for now, but are being removed in windows 11.
  - PinkMilkshake 5y ago
    Interesting! I had never tried. Do you know if the Google IME has the same issue?
    - lmm 5y ago
      No idea, I've never used a Google OS on a machine with a real keyboard.
      - PinkMilkshake 5y ago
        I meant this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Japanese_Input https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Japanese_Input

jfax 5y ago

Gemini does not aim to replace HTTP, I don't understand why this article is talking about it like it is?

dusted 5y ago

Indeed, one could at least argue that gopher was a simpler protocol, gemini makes short work of that, too, and leaves it to be only an incompatible and less capable https protocol with some other convention for the markup. I entirely agree that there's no good reason not to use HTTP[s] as a transport for textual information, which is kinda what it's made to do anyway.. I'd argue against a gemini content-type, I'd get as far away from the association with gemini as possible. text/feather is a better content-type, it makes it clear that it's text, with a feather-light structure imposed on it.. That structure should probably be very little more than support for line breaks and hyperlinks.

sertraline 5y ago

>it certainly does not justify completely replacing existing infrastructure and standards that humans have mutually agreed upon. It does, it makes sense. These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web, it led us to corporate controlled Internet where few major websites aggregate 80% of the content. It led us to scroll-jacking, bot-driven, located behind firewalls and captchas websites where genuine users can't even log in or post anything. It is why we have to use browsers that are more complex than entire operating systems just to support everything that can be done over HTTP. It led us to monopolies on web browsing - how many pages of web standards you have to implement and comply with if you want to make your own browser, just to visit google dot com? And at any time and moment all your efforts can be interrupted by security researchers who would tell you that your browser is insecure and now you have to comply with hundreds of pages of security standards as well, all because of how much can be done over HTTP. You can't even host a simple website over just HTTP without somebody telling you that you have to use HTTPS, even if you don't need it, because why not? You'll have the green icon! And because of such monopolies, most websites also turned into "shells" that try to ruin your experience as much as possible so you go and download their app where they have more control without being restricted by browsers. And this, in turn, led most people going off the general web and staying inside their apps. Sure, you can make your app that throws away most of HTTP-based bloat, but then someone forks and makes it support some of the bloat because they like it that way, and then someone else adds a bit more, and we are back at it again. You can't just "go back" and strip everything from HTTP, entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history, because there is no other road history of HTTP can walk by.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago
I'd say, web standards are an antipattern anyway. Look at this dark theme: https://randomnixfix.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/why-the-freebsd-desktop-and-my-linux-rant/ https://randomnixfix.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/why-the-freebs... should such things be supported? If not, how much effort would a browser implementation take?
- forty 5y ago
  Enabling reader mode on my already existing Firefox web browser makes this page perfectly readable. So very low effort as it already exists :)

FrozenVoid 5y ago

What author hints at is a view of Gemini community as ideologically monolithic Internet Amish, refusing technology and standards because they're opposed to modern state of things: the opposing(author) view is monoculture of Hypertext Web subjugating all protocols will eventually dominate due user-friendly and flexible nature of web stacks. Its obvious Gemini isn't a tech solution but a rebellion against corporate web dominance that intentionally cripples web experience for greater user control, but author tries to compare it with familiar web sub-formats that are characteristics of content: Gemini isn't about content, its a form of interaction that prescribes certain limits that Internet Amish will feel comfortable with, without introducing too much overhead(like Tor and I2P).

hammyhavoc 5y ago
The problem with analogies is that they are contextual.

rcarmo 5y ago

I went down the Gemini rabbit hole last week (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/17/0800 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/17/0800, and even coded my own minimalist server for it) and tend to agree that both its protocol and markup are oversimplified technical solutions in search of a problem, although I wouldn’t cast it so harshly. It does feel like escapism/subculture of sorts, and I do believe that retreat from the Web is one of the underlying motivations, but (maintaining a relatively minimalist Markdown-backed site myself) I agree that there are no real technical reasons for it to exist (even Markdown support is something that is relatively easy to agree upon across browsers). What I do like about it is the Lagrange browser, and the extremely legible reading experience—-I consume most of my content via RSS feeds and Reader Mode on websites I visit frequently, and I like the uniformity and predictability of the layout, as well as the lack of ads and distractions. I’d be happy enough if Lagrange’s unfettered visual style became a sort of “forced Reader mode” in standard browsers…

forty 5y ago

I think the author is analyzing Gemini from a technical / engineering perspective, and of course, it doesn't make any sense. I think Gemini lack of compatibility with the Web is its main feature, and I think people using Gemini want to create a separate new "community". The spirit is "we lost the web, it was taken over by corporate interests, let's accept it, leave it and create our new thing" (you can replace "corporate interests" by "normies" for some people I'm sure). I think this is all fine, creating new communities/clubs/whatever when you are not happy with existing ones is good, maybe you'll be alone in it, maybe not, good for you. I think the main problem I see here is that, if I understood properly, a Gemini link was shared on a web page. I don't think it is okay. You want to have your own private club, you got it. But please leave other clubs alone. It's perfectly okay that you don't want to communicate with me. But then don't.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"Why couldn't one simply build on top of existing HTTP infrastructure, throw away all the baggage and instead implement a new Content-Type, which existing browsers then could parse?" Because escaping the annoyances of the "modern web" may require escaping from the "modern browser". The changes users want to "modern browsers" will never be made. The vendors of these programs do not answer to users. They answer to web developers and advertisers. These are large, complex, insecure programs usually controlled by organisations that seek to profit from online advertising. The advertising focus leads to complex web pages. Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. (NB. Not "most", but "some".) Gemini, because of its limitations, allows users to retrieve resources without the need for one of these "modern browser" programs. If a new Content-Type was added to HTTP, what is the likelihood that other parties outside the "modern web browser" cabal would write small, simple, alternative browsers, e.g., aimed only at this Content-Type. Look at the market share, i.e., available selection, of web browsers. It is not diverse. Whereas, writing a Gemini client is dead simple. A Gemini browser cabal where users have only a few choices and they are each controlled by corporations is unlikely. Asking web developers to "please make simpler web pages, thanks", when the "modern browser" allows for complex pages and integration of advertising is not a succesful course of action. Most of these web developers answer to advertisers or to employers who answer to advertisers. They are not going to ditch the user annoyances, they are going to seek profits. Gemini seems to address this problem by making advertising difficult. Without the "modern browser", the possibilities for advertising are limited. Similarly, asking web users to "please use a text-only browser", e.g., Links, when so many web pages try to use "modern" browser features that enable complex web pages is probably not a successful strategy for many users either. As a long-time Links user, that strategy has worked for me, though. The only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It should be optional not mandatory.

bawolff 5y ago
> Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. And yet most of these users don't use lynx... > Only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. If you're only hosting 1 site, isn't the privacy leak negligible because there is 1:1 mapping from ip to domain so an attacker caneasily determine it. Besides, in a system playing fast and loose with pki, its more like a do not disturb sign than an actual lock.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bawolff 5y ago

Gemini is so silly. The logic is basically as follows: - people are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular. - instead lets make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. But people have to voluntarily use our system. For some reason people will use gemini voluntarily even though they refused to voluntarily use the web in a way we approve of in the first place.

foxfluff 5y ago
- People are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular. Some do but it's impossible to divine it ahead of time before you follow a link and see what horrors lie behind. - Instead let's make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. People have to voluntarily use our system. By virtue of having their content in our system, our users are guaranteed a comfortable experience.
_heimdall 5y ago
I went down the Gemini rabbit hole 6 or 8 months ago and didn't really understand the solution it offered, but you're really missing the point here. The idea isn't that consumers are using the web in a way that is disliked. The web is run by and for large corporations legally bound to do what is best for shareholders. The web allows those corporations to take advantage of consumers in ways that the average user doesn't understand and often wouldn't knowingly consent to, and in the process opens the door to entire classes of vulnerabilities that wouldn't otherwise exist. Gemini may include a few unpopular assumptions and limitations, but a consumer never has to worry about any content on Gemini being vulnerable to script injections, malicious spyware, or site silently mining crypto on your hardware. Tracking is still technically possible, as mentioned in the OP article, but in a very limited sense and only really at the level of page requests. Gemini may be an over correction, but it at least starts (or continues) the conversation of whether a limited feature set is the most effective way to fix so many of the problems on the web today.
DarylZero 5y ago
Imagine thinking that everything the billionaire-owned social media platforms choose to do is "popular" just because they do it.

foxfluff 5y ago

> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place, before this one collapses. The implication being that the web can be changed? I don't believe that, I believe the web is broken and it's only getting worse by the day. I'm not going to discourage you from trying though. > If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website [..] > If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it [..] Sorry, these are not answers for me as a user. When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra. And I'm also guaranteed not to have to play whack-a-mole with ublock/umatrix trying to make the actual fucking content somehow load. That's where the value is! "In theory, someone could make a nice website. Some actually do" is nice but it does nothing for my browsing experience in general, because the next link is going to be crap again.

flohofwoe 5y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't (consciously) heard of this Gemini thing before, but: > I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, ... I guarantee this will only be true until it becomes popular enough to be a juicy target for the more - uhm - "business-oriented" people, it's not because of a restricted feature set. Creating a technology which is intentionally uninteresting to business is an interesting angle of course which I can get behind ;)
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Now tell the business people you can't display images and can't tell apart bots from "real people" on Gemini. They'll much prefer to keep their ads on the web. Being uninteresting to business is indeed a feature not a bug, but i agree with much of the author's criticism of gemini reinventing a square wheel: it's fun but a modern web subset would probably be easier to learn for many people while keeping backwards-compat with the rest of the world.
  - shuntress 5y ago

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago

This post made me pretty interested in gemini. Since there are apparently a few users here: What server would you recommend to get started? Any small tutorials on setting up a gemini site? Any links to gemini sites (maybe your own) you want to share?

nurb 5y ago
There is a few gemini links on awesome-genini list. I haven't tried them out, but usually, awesome-* lists are good starting points. https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  Thanks!
reidrac 5y ago
This is a good resource: http://geminiquickst.art/ http://geminiquickst.art/

robalni 5y ago

> The question here shouldn’t be why not to use a subset of HTTP and HTML, but rather, why not build on top of HTTP with a different markup layer other than HTML. We have APIs using HTTP with JSON instead of HTML, for example. As you can read in the Gemini FAQ, the reason that Gemini is not compatible with HTTP is that it should be possible to know that when you browse Gemini content, you will stay in gemini content. If Gemini were compatible with HTTP, then when you make a Gemini website, you know that many people who use it probably are using HTTP browsers, so it will be easier to mix Gemini with HTTP links which means that Gemini users will be more exposed to the type of content that they were trying to avoid by using Gemini. If Gemini instead is incompatible with HTTP, it will be harder for site owners to put a HTTP link on their Gemini site because they don't know how the user's client will handle that. Maybe the best solution could have been something that makes it easy to get in but not as easy to get out. I mean something like it could be possible to have a HTTP link to a Gemini site that would work in all browsers, but that Gemini site could not have a HTTP link. I just don't know how you would make that.

_heimdall 5y ago
Is there actually a good way for Gemini as a protocol to make linking to an HTTP site harder? I don't think the protocol actually limits the type of link on a Gemini page, and if I click on an HTTP link in an app my OS will just pop it up in a web browser without a problem. Yes I'd know the app changed, but I'm not sure that would really help guard me from following a link to the current web
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  It is common for Gemini clients to represent HTTP links differently from Gemini or Gopher links, so the user can make an informed choice before clicking.

akagusu 5y ago

I think people just want something to rant about. Gemini folks maintain Gemini for themselves using their own hardware and their own time, so I think they can do whatever they think its best for them. If they want to strip HTTP and remove all cool features it has, it's their problem, not ours. If they want to treat content as text only, again, it's their problem, not ours. If they want to publish their content as Gemini only, it's their content, not ours. If they want to bikeshedding about internet protocols, it's their time, not ours. Now, about Gemini folks being elitists and intentionally excluding people with their protocol, take a minute to think about what tech companies are doing. Tech companies and many other companies that rely heavily on tech are making our society dependent more and more on online services, selling all kind of products and services that need an internet connection to work, even for basic features. In a world where half of population does not have internet connection, and geek folks feel excluded by a protocol just because they don't like it, how can we name what tech companies are doing, if it is not elitism and exclusion?

boring_twenties 5y ago
Tech companies will straight up ban you for unspecified reasons determined by some algorithm no one understands, with no recourse. It doesn't get any more "exclusionary" than that.
- krapp 5y ago
  "tech companies" are not a protocol, nor are they a network built on that protocol, so the comparison here is specious at best. HTTP doesn't ban anyone, nor does TCP/IP nor does HTML, the internet or the web.
- csb6 5y ago
  What does that have to do with the http protocol?

soapdog 5y ago

I just wrote a "Gemini is a little gem"[1] inspired by the OP article. I think that most criticism of Gemini kinda misses some important aspects of the ecosystem and ethos behind the protocol. [1]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html

ajioasfnokal 5y ago

I think a lot of the hostility people have towards Gemini comes from the frustration they have when they consider the absolutely massive scale of the modern web. Can a community of FOSS activists really fit the square peg of the modern web into the round hole of user-friendliness? Probably not. And I think on some level they understand this. Will governments around the world force user friendliness on major tech companies? Maybe, but probably not to the extent that satisfies us. Browsers are a natural monopoly. The reason is scale. Modern browsers are just too fucking big. Bob from Seattle isn't taking down Google with his neato "classic browsing experience". Nobody uses Bob's browser. So how do you rid the web of its surveillance scripts, telemetry-filled browsers, bad UX decisions, unnecessary bloat, manipulative algorithms and lowest-common-denominator pandering? Well, Gemini says you don't. This is where people get red in the face. How could you possibly give up the good fight!? Just visit websites that aren't trash! Well, sure. I do visit blogs that treat me well, but there's a reason most of the web is garbage. Because garbage makes money. Individual consumer decisions make up an aggregate of consumption behavior that shifts the market towards certain development patterns. "Surveillance capitalism" could also be called "you get unlimited entertainment for free, and in exchange I keep the receipts" capitalism. That's a pretty good deal for most people. And that's why the business model keeps getting copied. It's scalable, popular, practical, and yields the highest number of consumers of your product. It would literally be irrational for a business NOT to do this. When you block 30 trackers on someone's recipe page, you're taking a square peg and trying to force it into a round hole. That isn't a recipe page, but a tracking page that happens to have a recipe on it. Making it "work" is contrary to its intended purpose. So Gemini basically asks the question "what if we made a protocol that is architecturally predisposed to being user-friendly?" Gemini is a thought experiment in making a tool that's for a particular thing, for a particular group of likeminded people. What if instead of accepting dependancy on a browser duopoly, the protocol allowed anyone to hack up a browser in an afternoon? What if the protocol was designed to make surveillance capitalism an impossible business model? What if instead of trying to turn the corporate web into FOSSweb and bringing everyone into web utopia, developers created their own web that caters to user-friendly experiences for the niche minority of people who actually care about all that high-minded moralizing? So is Gemini useless? Maybe for you. But I found interesting blogs and I use the Lagrange client, which is very pretty. I enjoy reading peoples' thoughts on philosophy, economics, science, environmentalism, all kinds of things. And for the first time in decades, I feel like I'm actually surfing the web again, as I browse feed aggregators and click on random links, digging through post after post on all kinds of cool things. And it feels like a relaxing break from having to worry about what scripts may be on the sites I browse. I just click and go. Will Gemini show me 4k videos of puppies being carried around in strollers at the park? No. Gemini will never fill that part of my browsing habits. But does it have to? Consumers have become so domesticated in their mindset that one tool has to do it all. Once the tool turns out to work against you, you find yourself choosing between living in modern society or becoming a hermit. There is value in letting a hammer just be a hammer, and not trying to tape a saw on top of it.