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I love the idea behind Gemini but the people central to the project act like jack**es anytime you suggest something. First time I saw Gemini on HN I got so exc

by efitz 4y ago

I love the idea behind Gemini but the people central to the project act like jack**es anytime you suggest something. First time I saw Gemini on HN I got so excited and I emailed them and posted on the thread; I then subscribed to their email list server. The discussion there was along the lines of “yeah the discussion on HN was positive but just a bunch of feature requests from people ignorant of our tribal knowledge and we don’t like so meh”. It would be much more productive if they were engaging and gently instructive, eg “that’s an interesting idea and we thought about it but ultimately we decided that it wasn’t aligned with our project; here’s a link to the email archive discussion”. But instead they are completely dismissive. Sure they’re free to act that way, but it is just self marginalization as people will stop trying to engage with them and ignore the project.

mattlondon 4y ago
Agreed - it feels a bit like people get overly dogmatic about things at times. My view is that if they don't accept change (and to be fair there is some change - albeit minor - in the spec from time to time) then they risk browsers implementing their own things outside of the spec, and you end up with an internet explorer situation where there are non-standard things that everyone uses but which are not part of the spec A couple of examples is favicons and inline images - not in the spec but which a few clients and browsers support, but others don't. People will continue to find new and creative ways to squeeze in new things. If they are not flexible and open to change where it is legitimate and makes a positive impact, but instead act as some sort of holier-than-thou cabal where outsiders are shunned as they "don't get" Gemini etc, then they run the risk of the protocol getting out of control, or only ever being used by the few dozens of people who are true believers in the original spec being the only possible way. I am not saying let's open the floodgates to any and all features anyone can dream up, but things like tables seems like a legitimate feature that would add quite some value to Gemini's users. There also seems to be this odd view that clients must be super simple to implement (e.g. no tables, no inline-images, no inline-links etc), yet on the other hand they are asking clients to do a lot of TLS gymnastics with e.g. per URL client certificates and TOFU handling etc (enough that there are accompanying docs to the spec explaining the concepts etc to help client implementors get it right). Feels kinda hypercritical to me to insist on simplicity on one hand (and indeed justify decisions based on this requirement for simplicity), yet requiring quite some considerable complexity on the other. It is not like inline-links is anywhere even close to the devel-in-the-details level of code complexity required to handle TOFU databases of host certificates and allowing users to select individual client certificates for each request made etc.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
  > If they are not flexible and open to change where it is legitimate and makes a positive impact, but instead act as some sort of holier-than-thou cabal where outsiders are shunned as they "don't get" Gemini One of the main goals of Gemini is to have an immutable spec. The goal is to never add features. So yeah, the Gemini community is a little tired of people proposing changes and features to add to the spec. And I think it’s fair to say at some point that you “don’t get Gemini” if your first message to the mailing list is a request to add features. To address the favicon point—the spec explicitly disallows making more than one request to open a page. Favicons require a second request, and therefore are not compatible with Gemini. The Gemini community has had the conversation about favicons and decided they didn’t want them. AFAIK no browser supports them by default. Now what? To the TLS point, someone in Geminispace very recently proposed removing TLS citing the same arguments you did. There were dozens of Gemini posts made going back and forth, but on the whole the demand wasn’t there and we’re going to continue to use TLS. Gemini’s simplicity makes it super easy to criticize aspects of the design or suggest new features. So it gets boring. I could go find thousands of words on why Gemini doesn’t have TLS. But it wouldn’t be a better explanation that the one on the Gemini home page, which I assume that you’ve read and are unhappy with.
  - mattlondon 4y ago
    I have no issue with TLS in Gemini, just that it is pretty hypocritical in my mind to cite simplicity as a driving factor, but then use a complex-to-implement TLS system. Anyway I think you have missed my point - it is not about what the "immutable spec" says, but the risk that people go their own way and do their own things with Gemini. Favicons is one thing and may be "solved", but there will be more in the future that people will add, e.g. you are already seeing abuse of the preformated block and it's alt-tag to embed markdown content and tables "illegally". I guess the all-powerful immutable spec won't be able to be updated to handle that though. Oh well.
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
Two of the core ideas of Gemini are that it should have as few features as possible and that it should change as little as possible. Gemini is not very popular, but it is quite mature—there are a number of clients and servers and users who expect Gemini to not change. In this sense, Gemini is more mature and more resistant to change than the web. If you proposed adding a feature which would require changing clients or servers, as your first message on the mailing list, you probably got a response that ‘you don’t understand Gemini.’ Gemini isn’t looking for more people to suggest changes to the spec. If you’d like to create a Gemlog or write a client or a server, I hope that the Gemini community response is more polite.
Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t think there is anything stopping you from making Gemini v2? Just write out a new spec. It’ll be just like markdown.

by efitz 4y ago

mattlondon 4y ago

Agreed - it feels a bit like people get overly dogmatic about things at times. My view is that if they don't accept change (and to be fair there is some change - albeit minor - in the spec from time to time) then they risk browsers implementing their own things outside of the spec, and you end up with an internet explorer situation where there are non-standard things that everyone uses but which are not part of the spec A couple of examples is favicons and inline images - not in the spec but which a few clients and browsers support, but others don't. People will continue to find new and creative ways to squeeze in new things. If they are not flexible and open to change where it is legitimate and makes a positive impact, but instead act as some sort of holier-than-thou cabal where outsiders are shunned as they "don't get" Gemini etc, then they run the risk of the protocol getting out of control, or only ever being used by the few dozens of people who are true believers in the original spec being the only possible way. I am not saying let's open the floodgates to any and all features anyone can dream up, but things like tables seems like a legitimate feature that would add quite some value to Gemini's users. There also seems to be this odd view that clients must be super simple to implement (e.g. no tables, no inline-images, no inline-links etc), yet on the other hand they are asking clients to do a lot of TLS gymnastics with e.g. per URL client certificates and TOFU handling etc (enough that there are accompanying docs to the spec explaining the concepts etc to help client implementors get it right). Feels kinda hypercritical to me to insist on simplicity on one hand (and indeed justify decisions based on this requirement for simplicity), yet requiring quite some considerable complexity on the other. It is not like inline-links is anywhere even close to the devel-in-the-details level of code complexity required to handle TOFU databases of host certificates and allowing users to select individual client certificates for each request made etc.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
> If they are not flexible and open to change where it is legitimate and makes a positive impact, but instead act as some sort of holier-than-thou cabal where outsiders are shunned as they "don't get" Gemini One of the main goals of Gemini is to have an immutable spec. The goal is to never add features. So yeah, the Gemini community is a little tired of people proposing changes and features to add to the spec. And I think it’s fair to say at some point that you “don’t get Gemini” if your first message to the mailing list is a request to add features. To address the favicon point—the spec explicitly disallows making more than one request to open a page. Favicons require a second request, and therefore are not compatible with Gemini. The Gemini community has had the conversation about favicons and decided they didn’t want them. AFAIK no browser supports them by default. Now what? To the TLS point, someone in Geminispace very recently proposed removing TLS citing the same arguments you did. There were dozens of Gemini posts made going back and forth, but on the whole the demand wasn’t there and we’re going to continue to use TLS. Gemini’s simplicity makes it super easy to criticize aspects of the design or suggest new features. So it gets boring. I could go find thousands of words on why Gemini doesn’t have TLS. But it wouldn’t be a better explanation that the one on the Gemini home page, which I assume that you’ve read and are unhappy with.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  I have no issue with TLS in Gemini, just that it is pretty hypocritical in my mind to cite simplicity as a driving factor, but then use a complex-to-implement TLS system. Anyway I think you have missed my point - it is not about what the "immutable spec" says, but the risk that people go their own way and do their own things with Gemini. Favicons is one thing and may be "solved", but there will be more in the future that people will add, e.g. you are already seeing abuse of the preformated block and it's alt-tag to embed markdown content and tables "illegally". I guess the all-powerful immutable spec won't be able to be updated to handle that though. Oh well.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago

Two of the core ideas of Gemini are that it should have as few features as possible and that it should change as little as possible. Gemini is not very popular, but it is quite mature—there are a number of clients and servers and users who expect Gemini to not change. In this sense, Gemini is more mature and more resistant to change than the web. If you proposed adding a feature which would require changing clients or servers, as your first message on the mailing list, you probably got a response that ‘you don’t understand Gemini.’ Gemini isn’t looking for more people to suggest changes to the spec. If you’d like to create a Gemlog or write a client or a server, I hope that the Gemini community response is more polite.

Aeolun 4y ago

I don’t think there is anything stopping you from making Gemini v2? Just write out a new spec. It’ll be just like markdown.