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HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself. I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and oth

HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself. I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed

majkinetor 4y ago
Yeah, gemini is way to simple, its unpractical.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  Being unpractical is the point. It's unpractical to implement tracking, anything beyond simple ads, websites with flashy or distracting designs, picture-in-picture video autoplay like news websites often do, popups, moving banners, and RAM/CPU heavy client-side scripting (or any client-side scripting, for that matter). So your website will have to do without that. And that is by design. Gemini is designed to exclude those features, because the target audience of this protocol wants to browse a web where those features are impossible to include.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smartmic 4y ago
Fully agree. I am also wondering why simplicity needs its own protocol here. Striving for simplicity is more a philosophical than a technical task. Edit: The creation of new protocols and technical solutions alone increases cognitive complexity. From this point of view, it is even counterproductive if existing solutions can enable the same.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Dunno, the gemini protocol and gemtext format is like the internet equivalent of a 6502. It's extremely approachable to anyone with a basic understanding of programming. Like you could slap together a working client or a server in an afternoon, most likely. Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.
  - napolux 4y ago
    That's make it just a toy
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Of course, that's why it's so great.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      You say that, but plenty of old computers were based on the 6502. Those were used both for play and for real work. Before the time of resource-heavy network protocols, they could even host and access BBS systems (for those unfamiliar, basically a precursor of the Internet). Gemini cannot do a lot (which is by design), but it also has huge capabilities. For instance, while client-side logic is impossible, there's nothing preventing you from writing a "web app" that does its logic on the server side. Yes, you would require page refreshes to update what the client sees, but with Gemini each page load is much, much cheaper than HTML because the response payload is smaller to transfer and easier to parse. Assuming that your Gemini client allows enabling inline images, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a stateful web-app that is a clone of Twitter, Facebook or another social media site. There's no reason why you couldn't design a simple webmail client a la Gmail, or a system monitoring dashboard, or a bug tracker, or basically anything else that doesn't have to rely on complex layouts or inline video to do its job.
    - BizarreByte 4y ago
      It’s disheartening to see so many posts like this on ‘Hacker’News. It doesn’t have to be some big, serious thing for people to either enjoy or find useful. Some people had an idea, went out, and made it a reality, built a small community around it and now we have Gemini. We should encourage such things. Projects don’t need to change the world and they don’t need to be useful to all people or exploitable by corporations. Building something because it’s fun, or because you want it to exist is good enough.
    - anthk 4y ago
      Unix was born to play Space War. NCurses exists because of Rogue. Text adventures where used a lot on text parsing, and video games boosted the PC industry on multimedia.
- napolux 4y ago
  > I am also wondering why simplicity needs its own protocol here This "killed" Gemini from the start
- zppln 4y ago
  I think perhaps having their own protocol serve to encapsulate the community interested in this particular form of simplicity.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    That's pretty much the stated objective, in addition to designing the protocol in a way that freezes features at the outset to prevent it from becoming another Web 2.0.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I'm cross-publishing my website on gemini, basically rendering HTML and gemtext from a very slightly enhanced variant of gemtext that has some rendering hints that are stripped away. Like this page https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/ https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/ is rendered from this code: # Gemlog => /topic/ Browse by topic => /links/aggregators.gmi Aggregators => /log/feed.xml Atom Feed This section of the memex contains what might described as a weblog. %%% FEED %%% LISTING (the FEED directive tells it to generate an Atom feed, and LISTING to inline the documents list rather than put it in the side-bar in the HTML version) Gemtext is very close to what I want. The only thing I wish is that it had some rudimentary support for illustrative images. Not like inlined in the text, but at least centered figures. That would go a long way.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> but on HTTP(S), Gemini is fully encrypted It simply doesn't rely on the same chain the CIA and other agencies own inline images are left to the client implementation. Lagrange supports them, for example. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/tls-tutorial.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/tls-tutorial.gmi
jug 4y ago
Exactly. See my other post here — I think a HTML subset would make more sense. Then these sites would run safely on both Kristall and Firefox for as long as they adhered to this simplified standard.

HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself. I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed

majkinetor 4y ago

Yeah, gemini is way to simple, its unpractical.

selfhoster11 4y ago
Being unpractical is the point. It's unpractical to implement tracking, anything beyond simple ads, websites with flashy or distracting designs, picture-in-picture video autoplay like news websites often do, popups, moving banners, and RAM/CPU heavy client-side scripting (or any client-side scripting, for that matter). So your website will have to do without that. And that is by design. Gemini is designed to exclude those features, because the target audience of this protocol wants to browse a web where those features are impossible to include.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

smartmic 4y ago

Fully agree. I am also wondering why simplicity needs its own protocol here. Striving for simplicity is more a philosophical than a technical task. Edit: The creation of new protocols and technical solutions alone increases cognitive complexity. From this point of view, it is even counterproductive if existing solutions can enable the same.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Dunno, the gemini protocol and gemtext format is like the internet equivalent of a 6502. It's extremely approachable to anyone with a basic understanding of programming. Like you could slap together a working client or a server in an afternoon, most likely. Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.
- napolux 4y ago
  That's make it just a toy
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Of course, that's why it's so great.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    You say that, but plenty of old computers were based on the 6502. Those were used both for play and for real work. Before the time of resource-heavy network protocols, they could even host and access BBS systems (for those unfamiliar, basically a precursor of the Internet). Gemini cannot do a lot (which is by design), but it also has huge capabilities. For instance, while client-side logic is impossible, there's nothing preventing you from writing a "web app" that does its logic on the server side. Yes, you would require page refreshes to update what the client sees, but with Gemini each page load is much, much cheaper than HTML because the response payload is smaller to transfer and easier to parse. Assuming that your Gemini client allows enabling inline images, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a stateful web-app that is a clone of Twitter, Facebook or another social media site. There's no reason why you couldn't design a simple webmail client a la Gmail, or a system monitoring dashboard, or a bug tracker, or basically anything else that doesn't have to rely on complex layouts or inline video to do its job.
  - BizarreByte 4y ago
    It’s disheartening to see so many posts like this on ‘Hacker’News. It doesn’t have to be some big, serious thing for people to either enjoy or find useful. Some people had an idea, went out, and made it a reality, built a small community around it and now we have Gemini. We should encourage such things. Projects don’t need to change the world and they don’t need to be useful to all people or exploitable by corporations. Building something because it’s fun, or because you want it to exist is good enough.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Unix was born to play Space War. NCurses exists because of Rogue. Text adventures where used a lot on text parsing, and video games boosted the PC industry on multimedia.
napolux 4y ago
> I am also wondering why simplicity needs its own protocol here This "killed" Gemini from the start
zppln 4y ago
I think perhaps having their own protocol serve to encapsulate the community interested in this particular form of simplicity.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  That's pretty much the stated objective, in addition to designing the protocol in a way that freezes features at the outset to prevent it from becoming another Web 2.0.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I'm cross-publishing my website on gemini, basically rendering HTML and gemtext from a very slightly enhanced variant of gemtext that has some rendering hints that are stripped away. Like this page https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/ https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/ is rendered from this code: # Gemlog => /topic/ Browse by topic => /links/aggregators.gmi Aggregators => /log/feed.xml Atom Feed This section of the memex contains what might described as a weblog. %%% FEED %%% LISTING (the FEED directive tells it to generate an Atom feed, and LISTING to inline the documents list rather than put it in the side-bar in the HTML version) Gemtext is very close to what I want. The only thing I wish is that it had some rudimentary support for illustrative images. Not like inlined in the text, but at least centered figures. That would go a long way.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> but on HTTP(S), Gemini is fully encrypted It simply doesn't rely on the same chain the CIA and other agencies own inline images are left to the client implementation. Lagrange supports them, for example. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/tls-tutorial.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/tls-tutorial.gmi

jug 4y ago

Exactly. See my other post here — I think a HTML subset would make more sense. Then these sites would run safely on both Kristall and Firefox for as long as they adhered to this simplified standard.