3 ms·

Small Web, Indie Web and Gemini are terminally missing the point. The web in the 90s was an ecosystem that attracted people because of experimentation with the

by romaniv 7mo ago

Small Web, Indie Web and Gemini are terminally missing the point. The web in the 90s was an ecosystem that attracted people because of experimentation with the medium, diversity of content and certain free-spirited social defaults. It also attracted attention because it was a new, exciting and rapidly expanding phenomenon. To create something equivalent right now you would need to capture those properties, rather then try to revive old visual styles and technology. For a while I hoped that VR will become the new World Wide Web, but it was successfully torpedoed by the Metaverse initiative.

SirFatty 7mo ago
Which is exactly the point of Gemini.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  I'm a dinosaur who bemoans the loss of whatever-it-was we had prior to the mass exploitation and saturation of the web today, so I feel it's my duty to check out Gemini and stop complaining. I'm prepared to trade ease of use or some modern functionality for better content and less of what the internet has become.
- mattlondon 7mo ago
  Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me) It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.
  - okuntilnow 7mo ago
    There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.
  - wibbily 7mo ago
    It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; nothing stops you from sending Markdown if you want (and at least some clients will render it - same with inline images).
    - krapp 7mo ago
      Didn't the creator of the protocol go on a rant when someone made a browser for Gemini that included a favicon? I can't imagine the backlash if someone tried to normalize Markdown. Isn't the entire point of Gemini that it can never be extended or expanded upon? Maybe it would be better to create an entirely different protocol/alt web around Markdown that didn't risk running afoul of Gemini's philosophical restrictions?
      - mattlondon 7mo ago
        I think a "markdown-web" that uses some of the Gemini approaches for privacy and auth/identity etc would be pretty nice. Of course, as others have said, we could just use HTML without JavaScript or cookies and we'd be a lot of the way there with 95% less effort but hey in the future we'll probably just query an AI rather than load a web page ourselves.
        krapp 7mo ago
        Given how many people on HN say they like Gemini in principle but wish it weren't so restrictive, some people would use it. All of those people might just be that cross section of HN users, however.
gzread 7mo ago
It's about capturing the noncommerciality, not the experimentation. Most of the small web sites are just blogs, a solved problem by now, but there's interesting content in many of them.
cdrnsf 7mo ago
There's an element of nostalgia, certainly but it's also a reaction to the overwhelmingly commercial web. Why not build something instead of scrolling through brief videos interspersed with more and more ads that follow you everywhere? Large companies have helped build the web but they've done at least as much, if not more, to help kill it.
- Karrot_Kream 7mo ago
  The small web can be a lot of things, but IMO it gets too overrun by the ideologically zealous. One does not have to believe in primitive anarchism to enjoy camping, for example. In general it seems any niche idea on the internet is like candle flame to zealous moths.
  - krapp 7mo ago
    Ideological zealots are more or less the only people who hate the modern web so much that they want to quarantine themselves within an entirely different and functionally limited protocol or ecosystem. Everyone else is fine discussing camping in Facebook groups and on Reddit and wherever, maybe just using an ad blocker.
    - cdrnsf 7mo ago
      I don't think there's anything terribly modern about a collection of large companies trying to present themselves as the entirety of a given thing (the internet in this case).
      - krapp 7mo ago
        I don't think any social media platform has ever actually tried to present themselves as the entirety of the internet. I don't think anyone actually believes social media platforms comprise the entirety of the internet, either. But isn't really what people tend to complain about when they complain about the "modern" web. Mostly it's the complexity of websites and the presence of advertising and javascript, the homogeneity of frameworks versus the "quirkiness" of hand-coded HTML, the consolidation of content into platforms (versus, again, hand-coded HTML) and the fact that the web no longer entirely consists of people like themselves. And now AI, of course. And the fact that every single alt-web is more restrictive than the web, almost universally antithetical to "design" or "creativity" as opposed to pure hypertext, and seems meant to appeal only to the strictly technical mind, bears that out.

by romaniv 7mo ago

SirFatty 7mo ago

Which is exactly the point of Gemini.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
I'm a dinosaur who bemoans the loss of whatever-it-was we had prior to the mass exploitation and saturation of the web today, so I feel it's my duty to check out Gemini and stop complaining. I'm prepared to trade ease of use or some modern functionality for better content and less of what the internet has become.
mattlondon 7mo ago
Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me) It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.
- okuntilnow 7mo ago
  There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.
- wibbily 7mo ago
  It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; nothing stops you from sending Markdown if you want (and at least some clients will render it - same with inline images).
  - krapp 7mo ago
    Didn't the creator of the protocol go on a rant when someone made a browser for Gemini that included a favicon? I can't imagine the backlash if someone tried to normalize Markdown. Isn't the entire point of Gemini that it can never be extended or expanded upon? Maybe it would be better to create an entirely different protocol/alt web around Markdown that didn't risk running afoul of Gemini's philosophical restrictions?
    - mattlondon 7mo ago
      I think a "markdown-web" that uses some of the Gemini approaches for privacy and auth/identity etc would be pretty nice. Of course, as others have said, we could just use HTML without JavaScript or cookies and we'd be a lot of the way there with 95% less effort but hey in the future we'll probably just query an AI rather than load a web page ourselves.
      - krapp 7mo ago
        Given how many people on HN say they like Gemini in principle but wish it weren't so restrictive, some people would use it. All of those people might just be that cross section of HN users, however.

gzread 7mo ago

It's about capturing the noncommerciality, not the experimentation. Most of the small web sites are just blogs, a solved problem by now, but there's interesting content in many of them.

cdrnsf 7mo ago

There's an element of nostalgia, certainly but it's also a reaction to the overwhelmingly commercial web. Why not build something instead of scrolling through brief videos interspersed with more and more ads that follow you everywhere? Large companies have helped build the web but they've done at least as much, if not more, to help kill it.

Karrot_Kream 7mo ago
The small web can be a lot of things, but IMO it gets too overrun by the ideologically zealous. One does not have to believe in primitive anarchism to enjoy camping, for example. In general it seems any niche idea on the internet is like candle flame to zealous moths.
- krapp 7mo ago
  Ideological zealots are more or less the only people who hate the modern web so much that they want to quarantine themselves within an entirely different and functionally limited protocol or ecosystem. Everyone else is fine discussing camping in Facebook groups and on Reddit and wherever, maybe just using an ad blocker.
  - cdrnsf 7mo ago
    I don't think there's anything terribly modern about a collection of large companies trying to present themselves as the entirety of a given thing (the internet in this case).
    - krapp 7mo ago
      I don't think any social media platform has ever actually tried to present themselves as the entirety of the internet. I don't think anyone actually believes social media platforms comprise the entirety of the internet, either. But isn't really what people tend to complain about when they complain about the "modern" web. Mostly it's the complexity of websites and the presence of advertising and javascript, the homogeneity of frameworks versus the "quirkiness" of hand-coded HTML, the consolidation of content into platforms (versus, again, hand-coded HTML) and the fact that the web no longer entirely consists of people like themselves. And now AI, of course. And the fact that every single alt-web is more restrictive than the web, almost universally antithetical to "design" or "creativity" as opposed to pure hypertext, and seems meant to appeal only to the strictly technical mind, bears that out.