11 ms·

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 "

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.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    It's only a recurrent pattern because the capitalist machine is destroying creativity/leeway. Just like nature produces tomatoes (and other fruits/vegetables) of every color, but good luck finding a tomato that's not red in a supermarket. Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctrination (schools/media) to persuade the weird folks from being weird, we'll see more and more unique stuff.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Plausible but I think it's more generic than that. Evolution also filters out a lot of "creative" designs. Probably not as much as finance based markets I guess.
    - immibis 5y ago
      I noticed this with restaurants. Old location (Australia): you drive to a McDonald's and get a quarter pounder. New location (Europe): you walk down the street and there are heaps of little unique eating places and small chains. What causes the difference? I don't know. It might be down to city planning causing people to walk more and reducing the friction of entering a random store to get lunch. It could be something to do with real estate laws. It might just be cultural expectations. Point is, this "big chain culture" is not universal and not inevitable. It's something we humans created in certain areas.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        It has to do with the economic system and local urban planning. Many cities in Europe have refused permits for Mac Donald's to open shop, and that's a good thing. Because once settled, these megacorps who pay less than 1% taxes will take away all the business because they can have a bigger variety of products/services that a small shop can't afford, at a price driven by economies of scale that a small shop can't afford, treating employees in an illegal manner that a small shop can't afford to go to court over, and avoiding taxes through loopholes which small shops can't afford to know about. If you can, don't let chains setup store near your home. If you can't, seriously consider getting involved in sabotage operations with people you trust. That's how Google ended backing off from Kreuzberg (Berlin) a few years back. Mac Donald's also had a few famous burnt-down "restaurants" here in France, but sabotage doesn't have to involve flames. A pack of sugar down the concrete-mixer will do the trick. If the shop has opened already, anything to block the locks will block business for at least a few hours. It's David vs Goliath but if you've got support from your neighborhood you can win. Just don't ever think police and politicians are on your side.
- CookieMon 5y ago
  https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ made the interesting observation that a big chunk of that amateur OG internet never stopped or went away, Google etc. just stopped linking to it and it went invisible.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    Without numbers, it's hard to say how much of it is left. However, I do believe that a big chunk left and mere tiny bits of it are left. And of course, archives of old and now dead things.. The vast majority of people on the internet are not ever exposed to that kind of web (and most of those who were have moved on). How does someone even find out such a thing exists? How does someone figure out how to participate, if their entire web experience comes from facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram era? In the 90s, the original amateur internet was something you'd be inevitably exposed to if you did anything at all on the web. Geocities was a thing, ISPs often offered free space for hosting personal home pages. I saw normies, total non-geeks make personal home pages because that's just the kind of thing people found on the web and wanted to try. My older sister had her own homepage. She's not a programmer and not a geek. Her site was a part of some webring, linking other sites made by teenage girls.. "Social media" was forums, likewise hosted by individuals, often in conjunction with their personal home pages, linking to other such sites... I think the vast majority of it is simply gone.
knowledge-clay 5y ago
> people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols. > Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech! I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2020, The only thing being produced on Gemini now is "content", and there's more of it than ever!
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  Well, it still doesn’t seem to have escaped the narrow community of “geeks who are into tech-related things”. I’d really like to see things that I don’t already see on places like HN (because for these things I’ll just use HN).
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I don't think gopher/gemini is geeks only, and the overlap with HN is certainly small. It's very popular in some communities such as the tildeverse where less-techie folks write on gemini as well. Last time i surfed on gemini (like a year ago) i was surprised there was so little technical content.
- square_usual 5y ago
  "Bikeshedding about internet protocols" doesn't mean bikeshedding the gemini protocol specifically. The Gemini protocol is stable, I'm sure, but what I mean is that people are more interested in discussing the tech especially vs http or whatever.
tpoacher 5y ago
> is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content? Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. It simply enforces a separation of those experiences from the text. The reason this is a bad thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create rich user experiences. The reason this is a good thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create "rich" user experiences.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. I strongly disagree. By willingly limiting the markup, gemini actively tries to prevent you from doing these things. In contrast, what's wrong with the web is everything JavaScript and some early design issues with CSS, but HTML is good (although it could be simplified/improved). xHTML more specifically is easy to parse and extensible so that different clients can implement more features. We need more HTML less JavaScript. In this sense, going the gopher route is a step backwards in my view, because it means for most of my practical needs (such as a simple user-submitted form) i need to stick with the web as we know it while i would be more than happy to take part and contribute in a privacy-friendly/minimalist subset of the web (as a standard i mean, i already do that on my websites).
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    I respect your disagreement, but I feel like you're disagreeing against the wrong point here though. The main difference between gemini (the protocol) and http, isn't that a gemini page need only contain text and be deprived of all other kinds of context. The gemini protocol does not stop you from interacting with specific filetypes or other protocols, any more than http does. It's a protocol. It's up to people implementing clients to the gemini protocol to decide how to handle such externalities. E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page, which I like. I haven't tried audio files, but I imagine they could probably work similarly if necessary. Along similar lines, the gemtext specification is not intended as some sort of viable html alternative. It has completely different design goals. So no, the point isn't about limiting the kind of content you can interact with. The point is, by enforcing a degree of separation between what is "content" (i.e. text), and what is "externalities", this makes simplicity of text (both in terms of presentation and production) the main driver, leaving externalities up to implementations (which may be as simple as encouraging actual external use, including an http browser for http content). More importantly, this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster, whose agenda may not match yours as a user. And some (including myself) actually like this separation.

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.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  It's only a recurrent pattern because the capitalist machine is destroying creativity/leeway. Just like nature produces tomatoes (and other fruits/vegetables) of every color, but good luck finding a tomato that's not red in a supermarket. Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctrination (schools/media) to persuade the weird folks from being weird, we'll see more and more unique stuff.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Plausible but I think it's more generic than that. Evolution also filters out a lot of "creative" designs. Probably not as much as finance based markets I guess.
  - immibis 5y ago
    I noticed this with restaurants. Old location (Australia): you drive to a McDonald's and get a quarter pounder. New location (Europe): you walk down the street and there are heaps of little unique eating places and small chains. What causes the difference? I don't know. It might be down to city planning causing people to walk more and reducing the friction of entering a random store to get lunch. It could be something to do with real estate laws. It might just be cultural expectations. Point is, this "big chain culture" is not universal and not inevitable. It's something we humans created in certain areas.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      It has to do with the economic system and local urban planning. Many cities in Europe have refused permits for Mac Donald's to open shop, and that's a good thing. Because once settled, these megacorps who pay less than 1% taxes will take away all the business because they can have a bigger variety of products/services that a small shop can't afford, at a price driven by economies of scale that a small shop can't afford, treating employees in an illegal manner that a small shop can't afford to go to court over, and avoiding taxes through loopholes which small shops can't afford to know about. If you can, don't let chains setup store near your home. If you can't, seriously consider getting involved in sabotage operations with people you trust. That's how Google ended backing off from Kreuzberg (Berlin) a few years back. Mac Donald's also had a few famous burnt-down "restaurants" here in France, but sabotage doesn't have to involve flames. A pack of sugar down the concrete-mixer will do the trick. If the shop has opened already, anything to block the locks will block business for at least a few hours. It's David vs Goliath but if you've got support from your neighborhood you can win. Just don't ever think police and politicians are on your side.
CookieMon 5y ago
https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ made the interesting observation that a big chunk of that amateur OG internet never stopped or went away, Google etc. just stopped linking to it and it went invisible.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Without numbers, it's hard to say how much of it is left. However, I do believe that a big chunk left and mere tiny bits of it are left. And of course, archives of old and now dead things.. The vast majority of people on the internet are not ever exposed to that kind of web (and most of those who were have moved on). How does someone even find out such a thing exists? How does someone figure out how to participate, if their entire web experience comes from facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram era? In the 90s, the original amateur internet was something you'd be inevitably exposed to if you did anything at all on the web. Geocities was a thing, ISPs often offered free space for hosting personal home pages. I saw normies, total non-geeks make personal home pages because that's just the kind of thing people found on the web and wanted to try. My older sister had her own homepage. She's not a programmer and not a geek. Her site was a part of some webring, linking other sites made by teenage girls.. "Social media" was forums, likewise hosted by individuals, often in conjunction with their personal home pages, linking to other such sites... I think the vast majority of it is simply gone.

knowledge-clay 5y ago

> people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols. > Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech! I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2020, The only thing being produced on Gemini now is "content", and there's more of it than ever!

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
Well, it still doesn’t seem to have escaped the narrow community of “geeks who are into tech-related things”. I’d really like to see things that I don’t already see on places like HN (because for these things I’ll just use HN).
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I don't think gopher/gemini is geeks only, and the overlap with HN is certainly small. It's very popular in some communities such as the tildeverse where less-techie folks write on gemini as well. Last time i surfed on gemini (like a year ago) i was surprised there was so little technical content.
square_usual 5y ago
"Bikeshedding about internet protocols" doesn't mean bikeshedding the gemini protocol specifically. The Gemini protocol is stable, I'm sure, but what I mean is that people are more interested in discussing the tech especially vs http or whatever.

tpoacher 5y ago

> is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content? Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. It simply enforces a separation of those experiences from the text. The reason this is a bad thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create rich user experiences. The reason this is a good thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create "rich" user experiences.

southerntofu 5y ago
> Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. I strongly disagree. By willingly limiting the markup, gemini actively tries to prevent you from doing these things. In contrast, what's wrong with the web is everything JavaScript and some early design issues with CSS, but HTML is good (although it could be simplified/improved). xHTML more specifically is easy to parse and extensible so that different clients can implement more features. We need more HTML less JavaScript. In this sense, going the gopher route is a step backwards in my view, because it means for most of my practical needs (such as a simple user-submitted form) i need to stick with the web as we know it while i would be more than happy to take part and contribute in a privacy-friendly/minimalist subset of the web (as a standard i mean, i already do that on my websites).
- tpoacher 5y ago
  I respect your disagreement, but I feel like you're disagreeing against the wrong point here though. The main difference between gemini (the protocol) and http, isn't that a gemini page need only contain text and be deprived of all other kinds of context. The gemini protocol does not stop you from interacting with specific filetypes or other protocols, any more than http does. It's a protocol. It's up to people implementing clients to the gemini protocol to decide how to handle such externalities. E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page, which I like. I haven't tried audio files, but I imagine they could probably work similarly if necessary. Along similar lines, the gemtext specification is not intended as some sort of viable html alternative. It has completely different design goals. So no, the point isn't about limiting the kind of content you can interact with. The point is, by enforcing a degree of separation between what is "content" (i.e. text), and what is "externalities", this makes simplicity of text (both in terms of presentation and production) the main driver, leaving externalities up to implementations (which may be as simple as encouraging actual external use, including an http browser for http content). More importantly, this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster, whose agenda may not match yours as a user. And some (including myself) actually like this separation.