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What the eff Is Gemini?
- cpsns 4y agoMy main issue with Gemini remains the hard requirement of TLS. It makes it useless in a bunch of situations where it could actually excel. I guess ultimately it doesn’t matter, Gopher has more content, more services, and more users.
- arcanesciences 4y agoAfaik Gemini has considerably more active use than Gopher does at this point (I use both)
- markstos 4y agoI miss inline images in most Gemini browsers. Though, most ebooks don't have images and people love reading those. But I love the small, human-scale web idea and I'm glad there continues to excitement around Gemini.
- doublepg23 4y agoElaho on iOS and Lagrange everywhere else seem to support in-line images fine.
- gerikson 4y agoDoes Elaho work for you? It doesn't load any content for me (iOS 15.6.1)
- doublepg23 4y agoLoads gemini://cosmic.voyage/ships/ and other pages for me fine. (iPad Pro M1 16.2)
- gerikson 4y agoThanks! I installed it on another iDevice and it worked there. No clue why it's not working on my main phone but I can live with that.
- somat 4y agoI have to admit gemini leave me confused as well. gemini is a simple easy to understand protocol. simpler then http? a specification of which I can put in this comment? http: a bunch of newline separated key=value pairs followed by a double newline everything else is the content.
- gpderetta 4y agoyour description specifies the syntax, not the semantics of the key/value pairs nor the protocol state machine.
- somat 4y agoA fair point but my point is that http is a very simple easy to use specification, and for content html can be a very simple easy to use document format, gemini is fine, I think it is great that people are having fun on the internet, you will however have a hard time convincing me that http/html is too complicated. Note that html can be too complicated, but it does not have to be, not everything needs to be some sort of monstrous framework heavy single page javascript encumbered anomaly.
- Buffout 4y ago[dead]
- fsiefken 4y agoyes, the argument goes that because html can be too complicated gemini was designed to actively prevent and limit these complications. Of course html can be used in a simple gemini- or gopherlike way as well. But some purists want nothing to do with the complexities, distractions from and corruption of pure textual information.
- CharlesW 4y ago> Note that html can be too complicated, but it does not have to be, not everything needs to be some sort of monstrous framework heavy single page javascript encumbered anomaly. The philosophy of Gemini seems to be that it's not enough that people can create Gemini's austere's experience with the web, but that everyone must be forced to conform. I guess "punk" has lost all of it's meaning.
- TheEnder8 4y agoI hate to say this, but it’s a poor choice of names. It’s going to be overshadowed by the crypto company.
- gerikson 4y agoI'm not a huge fan of the protocol but I do believe it will survive the crypto company.
- hughw 4y agoWhen I click the link gemini://cities.yesterweb.org/ in my Safari browser, it launches an installed app I have named Gemini.
- prmoustache 4y agoI have been hearing about the protocol for at least 2 years but never heard of a crypto company. I would say the name is rather unfortunate in the sense that any search will lead you first to the NASA program and zodiac signs.
- doublepg23 4y agoI actually made a friend I’ve been talking with a year and half of gemspace. I’m not even active on it anymore but I’m grateful it connected me to such a cool person.
- baryphonic 4y ago> Gemini is the web reimagined through the lens of human scale anticapitalism. (Emphasis added) IMO, I'd much rather have a web that is anticommunist. The gatekeepers today act quite a bit like a politburo and the "content" that is allowed feels a bit like Pravda's editors were involved.
- ifore 4y agoWho are the “gatekeepers” stopping you from running a webserver with whatever “content” you want?
- jedrek 4y agoThe gatekeepers are exclusively capitalist companies. You realize one of the goals of capitalism is to replace all public services with private, for-profit ones?
- seanw444 4y agoThere are plenty cases where I have no problem with private companies and their products. But software is one situation where I just can't convince myself anymore to buy perpetual licenses for, when it's blackbox, and usually spyware. And they go the extra mile to handicap it for profit, when the MVP would be cheaper without it anyways. The only things I think are worth paying for digitally are art, games (which I guess are art), and services. But I'm not paying a license for a text editor, for example. Running proprietary code feels... subpar and janky, I guess?
- fsiefken 4y agogemini like http is decentralized
- roywiggins 4y agoGemini has even fewer gatekeepers than the normal web. There aren't any corporations trying to establish themselves as "the AOL of Gemini" or whatever. If it leans in any direction it's anarchist.
- velcrovan 4y agoAs the saying goes, I support the rhetorical goals of this creator — but I would be hesitant to tout as an anti-capitalist project something that actively forbids personalization.
- gerikson 4y agoIn what way does it forbid personalization? Is it because the client enforces styling? I got around that in my (deactivated) site with some ascii art and unicode glyphs. Most capsules are quite distinct with regards to these elements.
- jxf 4y agoNot sure if it's just me, but this did nothing to clear up "what the eff" Gemini was for me (and I also thought it was the crypto company at first). It's clear that it's a protocol but I'm unclear what I do with it or why I would use it. Is there, like, a tangible example or a screenshot that would clarify this?
- gerikson 4y agoThe Wikipedia page (linked) is a good introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) My take Kinder: an updated Gopher Snarkier: a technical solution to a social problem
- akkartik 4y agoA tool to carve out a space without the social problem. There are phenomena on the web that can just never happen on Gemini, for better or for worse. (E.g. autoloading images) And that will keep the size of the social gathering permanently down and avoid Eternal September.
- gerikson 4y agoExactly. The tech is the gatekeeper to ensure that the social group is self-selecting.
- randallsquared 4y agoEverything that can be used to solve widespread problems in a lasting way is technical. People snark a lot about social problems and the supposed contrast with merely technical solutions, but the gap at which this gestures is that we do not have enough understanding of societies (or other large groups of people) to engineer socially technical solutions with designed consequences.
- jxf 4y agoAfter reading more, "an updated Gopher" sounds like a good summary. I am too young to have interacted with Gopher in its heyday, but I've always thought the idea was neat, and I love the idea of a closer-to-text-mode interface to this stuff. Thanks for the comment!
- tiledjinn 4y agoGemini is problematic for me because i love the idea of a simpler web, but it doesn't solve any of its core goals around avoiding effects of advertisement while also being less accessible. There's nothing stopping someone from doing any of the dark pattern stuff in gemini the creator is upset about with the modern web. And there's nothing stopping someone from avoiding all of it with http. It doesn't really serve a good purpose as an application layer protocol. See also a longer form writeup of similar issues: https://マリウス.com/gemini-is-solutionism-at-its-worst/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/gemini-is-solutionism-at-its-worst...
- akkartik 4y agoPsst, thanks for all your good work keeping the riffraff out. My response the last time your post was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067400#30068447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067400#30068447
- tiledjinn 4y ago[flagged]
- LesZedCB 4y ago~~You were the top level comment on that thread.~~ Edit: nvm, got the usernames backwards
- tiledjinn 4y agoThat would be pretty difficult, as this is my first comment chain on HN in around ten years.
- akkartik 4y agoOh sorry, I just realized I misread your first comment. I thought you said that blog post was yours. (I still disagree with your position as my link expresses from earlier.)
- 4y ago
- GuB-42 4y agoAs I always say, the biggest issue I have with Gemini is TLS and encryption in general, for several reasons. The first one is obvious: Gemini is supposed to be simple and not evolutive. TLS fits neither points. The second one is more philosophical From the article: "The big deal is that the modern internet sucks. It started as something to share knowledge, and quickly became a platform for survielance and exploitation". Gemini was created in reaction to that. Now, think of what https really is for, what drove its adoption, and why the modern web needs it. And that's e-commerce! The biggest use case by far is so that you can safely send your credit card number to pay for stuff. In the early days, that's almost exclusively what it was used for. Google for instance strongly pushes for https everywhere, what do you think it is for? Your privacy or for commercial transactions? Now, think about how to keep the commercial activity that lead to the modern web out of your little community. Ban encryption, do not mandate it! No encryption means no credit card numbers, no passwords, no accounts, no access control, you will get something that it hardly exploitable, and therefore less likely to be tainted by the "modern web". If you just want to share knowledge, there is no point hiding it with encryption. But what about privacy? Well, you achieve that simply by not putting private information on a public network. And if you really want privacy, for example because you are about to share or browse sensitive or illegal data, then TLS is quite limited. There are networks that are explicitly designed for that use case, such as FreeNet, these are a much better option than using an encryption scheme that was primarily designed to facilitate e-commerce.
- hughw 4y ago> But what about privacy? Well, you achieve that simply by not putting private information on a public network. But what about shielding my behavior from snooping? Like my DNS queries, the web sites I visit. I would also like to be able to identify myself and have others do so, with some assurance that nobody is impersonating me or them. These are cases where I do want to, and must, put private (meta-)information on the public network.
- GuB-42 4y agoAs I already mentioned, TLS is a poor choice for snooping prevention. It does offer some protection since you don't know the exact resource you are requesting, but the domain is clear. If you really need that kind of privacy, I think there are more appropriate options. And also, why would you want to identify yourself? AFAIK, Gemini is very limited in term of uploading: there are no forms or PUT requests. The only reason I can think of would be access control, but that's something I would rather not have. On the server side, TLS only guarantees you that you are on the right server, but not that it is the right content, that part would be better served by something like a PGP block. Another advantage of using these kinds of digital signatures is that it wouldn't force additional complexity. It is just text: the server don't have to care about that, verification can be made client-side.
- jslql 4y ago[flagged]
- cpsns 4y agoPeople are increasingly angry and disillusioned with how society is, or isn’t working. It’s not really a surprise there’s been an increase in such opinions and thus posts when one looks at the general state of things.
- krapp 4y agoIt's sad that hacker culture was taken over and corrupted by capitalists who turned the web into a shopping mall and then started bitching about how it all lost its quirky small town charm a decade later. But what can you do?
- every 4y agoI abandoned gopher several years ago because I had to rely on proxy servers for access from the web. But at least lynx [1] supports the gopher protocol. Gemini requires either a niche browser or reliance on a proxy. No thanks... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
- snvzz 4y agoYou're apparently fine using a HTTP browser for browsing HTTP, but for some reason you refuse to use a Gopher browser to browse Gopher. I don't get it. Why can't you just realize "I am not interested in Gopher" and move on?
- msla 4y ago> Gemini requires either a niche browser You mean like Lynx?
- every 4y agoLynx is the oldest web browser still under development. It is also arguably the best gopher browser. It is a standard utility available on a host of *nix and other platforms. I started using it 25 years ago as a DOS port...
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoFrom [0]: > What Gemini is doing, is saying “we don’t need no videos, images, stylesheets, nor JavaScripts, because we want to have a lightweight web experience, so we throw all that crap out!”. Fine, sounds great. But why does it require a new protocol for that? 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? [0]: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/gemini-is-solutionism-at-its-worst/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/gemini-is-solutionism-at-its-worst...
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoYou can absolutely include links to media (images, audio, video) in a Gemini document if you want. You just have to download them to view them. Some clients will render them inline when you click on them. > 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? - So Google/Microsoft doesn't ruin it. - So you don't need to rely on huge applications basically emulating operating system functionality at this point with millions of LOC and opportunities for vulnerabilities just to publish some text or links. - So you don't need to really rely on any application at all. `openssl s_connect` will get Gemini pages in a text file just fine if/as needed. - Gemini's line format is easy to parse for scripts.
- superkuh 4y ago>- So Google/Microsoft doesn't ruin it. Google/Microsoft/etc are already shifting away from the web as we know it to HTTP/3. Once their money making properties are all QUIC/udp based it won't be long before they start depreciating tcp HTTP/1.1 support "for security" reasons. And from a megacorp/institutional/for-profit point of view that makes perfect sense. >So you don't need to really rely on any application at all. So you don't need to rely on huge applications. Gemini's line format is easy to parse for scripts. HTTP/1.1 can serve these same functions as Gemini with immeasurably broader support. As the commercial web switches to HTTP/3 the demographic left will reflect these aspirations.
- blippage 4y agoI like gemini, and have a "capsule" hosted over on sdf. Gemtext files are great for writing technical documentation. I have a capsule hosted privately on my desktop, for speedier access. The SDF site often runs slowly. Setting up the whole TLS security stuff is a chore, mind and will likely take awhile if/when I upgrade my system. One thing I do have is a proxy server that serves gemtext files as gophermaps. It's a pretty simple perl script, and I've ironed out most of the bugs. That took a little while, because there were a lot of corner cases to get right. There's an alternative protocol called Spartan, which is very very similar to Gemini, but without TLS. I wrote a little Spartan server in Go, so when I want to get an internal site up quickly, I can just "go run sss.go" and bam, there we are. I think there's also another protocol, called Mercury, that is Gemini without the TLS. I haven't heard much about it, though.
- effnorwood 4y ago[dead]
- guestbest 4y agoI think that NNTP making a comeback would be better than a simpler HTTP or adding more features to Gopher. But people can already have that with a Reddit clone or phpbb.
- hayley-patton 4y agoWhat even is "small" or "human scaled" when dealing with tools such as computers? I still can't figure it out. It seems to depend on how much leverage one gets from the computer, and any insistence on human-scaling is prone to underestimate that. The Web is definitely too large for comprehension, to be clear, but there is more room to play in than used by Gemini. I don't have any problems with TLS; one probably already has OpenSSL around. More or less TLS is too big (in popularity) to fail - there are smaller implementations like BearSSL too. If it really is an issue, one has a perfectly fine protocol removing the TLS wrapper; it won't be Gemini though.