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!)
> 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!
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.
> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place, before this one collapses.
The implication being that the web can be changed? I don't believe that, I believe the web is broken and it's only getting worse by the day. I'm not going to discourage you from trying though.
> If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website [..]
> If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it [..]
Sorry, these are not answers for me as a user. When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra. And I'm also guaranteed not to have to play whack-a-mole with ublock/umatrix trying to make the actual fucking content somehow load. That's where the value is! "In theory, someone could make a nice website. Some actually do" is nice but it does nothing for my browsing experience in general, because the next link is going to be crap again.
Disclaimer: I haven't (consciously) heard of this Gemini thing before, but:
> I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, ...
I guarantee this will only be true until it becomes popular enough to be a juicy target for the more - uhm - "business-oriented" people, it's not because of a restricted feature set.
Creating a technology which is intentionally uninteresting to business is an interesting angle of course which I can get behind ;)
Sure, but there are plenty of users that are out there with different needs than you. Plenty of people out there don't deal with text well. One of the best parts of the web has been the ability to share images and simulations. Gemini space has no 3Blue1Brown and no Khan Academy. You can't watch a master cabinetmaker hand carve some dovetails. Gemini can't display textual math because the only thing text/gemini supports is UTF-8 text. There was talk in the early days of having screen readers and such but it's mostly gone unfollowed up on. There were a lot of debates about other accessibility things but the minimalist faction ended up winning over the pro-accessibility faction.
Gemini is only useful as a user if you're a software hacker who doesn't like math or images or videos or other media and have no accessibility needs. And it's borne out on Gemini space itself, as that is the core demographic of Gemini. To me Gemini feels more like a clique than an open space, where the text-loving cool-kids hang out. As far as internet projects that I feel are more inclusive (which isn't a high bar compared to Gemini), I find Usenet, Yggdrasil, and Secure Scuttlebutt better. There's a lot less waxing and waning about good and evil (and how the Geminauts are good, of course) on those places too.
That seems more like an artifact of it not being popular than a feature of the protocol. If companies wanted to, they could just run native advertisement on Gemini just like they do elsewhere, just disguise the ad as regular news article and call it a day. Nothing stops them from putting banners on top of every page either or how about showing you an ad text before you are allowed to visit the actual content? You could even have a server-side wait time before you are allowed to move on from the ad.
Gemini just feels like rolling back the Web to an earlier stage without actually adding anything meaningful. If it ever got popular, it would devolve just the same as the Web already did, as it's nothing more than the same thing with a different paint job.
My personal take on this is that the core of everything wrong with the Web is the request–response nature of the protocol, as that allows to do a lot of crooked stuff on the server side, either intentionally (e.g. monitoring user activity, showing different content to different people) or unintentionally (e.g. causing broken links by servers going down). If the client gets plain-text or HTML really doesn't make a difference.
Another big issue is that publishing on the Web is far too complicated and expensive, which is why nobody is doing it anymore and instead relies on Facebook, Youtube and Co.
Something like IPFS feels like a much more valuable attempt as fixing the Web, as IPFS gets away from the request-response and turns the Web into a persistent data structure, that can't just be meddled with at the server side. It also makes publish substantially easier, as hosting is no longer tied to any single company, multiple people can host the same content and you don't have to pay and maintain a DNS record.
The part that is still missing with IPFS is a better replacement HTML. Stuff like pagination, image galleries, shopping carts, comments, etc. really need to become part of HTML, instead of stuff people hack together with Javascript or server side scripts. And how come we don't have an <advertising> tag yet?
Efforts in simplification should really happen on the users side, not in the protocol.
> The implication being that the web can be changed?
Yes - the slice you visit can be changed for you by using the right user-agent (as suggested in TFA).
> When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra
Why can't gemini space be defined by "Content-type: text/gemini" sites linking to each other and/or a limited functionality browser that doesn't render content you don't like?
I'm not yet sure how I feel about Gemini (I like inline links), but this post makes me think it's starting to gain some traction. It's past the "first they ignore it" and "then they laugh at it" phases and now into the "then they fight it" phase.
Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)
I guess it depends on how big of a "they" is required -- and if this is an attack, not harsh laughter.
That said, I think Gemini is intentionally designed to be ignored; an enclave or ghetto on the Internet, depending which connotations the speaker wants to have. Its success or failure will depend on its ability to have a self-sustaining community, which is interesting mainly in that discovering Gemini requires finding it via the web at the moment. I suppose there might be a Gemini-IRC connection, too; we will see if Gemini has IRC's longevity.
The way I see it, constant complaints about the web led to Gemini, so the constant complaints about Gemini will inevitably lead to... something else.
Unfortunately, that something else will also be minimalistic, separatist and elitist, just less so than Gemini. It will probably use a strict subset of Markdown and be primarily text-focused and won't support scripting. But rather than "a thousand flowers" blooming we'll just have Gemini and "Gemini lite," because that would satisfy the needs of 99% of the potential audience for such things.
> language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive[...] why not let a thousand flowers bloom?
Because resources are not infinite. Gemini sucks the air out of the room.
> Sometimes an adage is trotted out that goes roughly like this: Welp, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing!¶ And sometimes that's true. It's at least widely understood to be true, I think.¶ What I don't see mentioned, ever, is that sometimes "it's better than nothing" is really, really not true. In some cases, something is _worse_ than nothing.
> I think the real tragedy of Gemini is that although its existence is a reaction to a genuine problem[... i]t's another instance of a bad solution to a problem making that problem worse. This happens when bad solutions capture the attention of people concerned with and/or affected by the problem, and then they divert resources away[...] instead of allowing those resources to be better put to good use
>it certainly does not justify completely replacing existing infrastructure and standards that humans have mutually agreed upon.
It does, it makes sense. These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web, it led us to corporate controlled Internet where few major websites aggregate 80% of the content. It led us to scroll-jacking, bot-driven, located behind firewalls and captchas websites where genuine users can't even log in or post anything.
It is why we have to use browsers that are more complex than entire operating systems just to support everything that can be done over HTTP. It led us to monopolies on web browsing - how many pages of web standards you have to implement and comply with if you want to make your own browser, just to visit google dot com? And at any time and moment all your efforts can be interrupted by security researchers who would tell you that your browser is insecure and now you have to comply with hundreds of pages of security standards as well, all because of how much can be done over HTTP. You can't even host a simple website over just HTTP without somebody telling you that you have to use HTTPS, even if you don't need it, because why not? You'll have the green icon!
And because of such monopolies, most websites also turned into "shells" that try to ruin your experience as much as possible so you go and download their app where they have more control without being restricted by browsers. And this, in turn, led most people going off the general web and staying inside their apps.
Sure, you can make your app that throws away most of HTTP-based bloat, but then someone forks and makes it support some of the bloat because they like it that way, and then someone else adds a bit more, and we are back at it again. You can't just "go back" and strip everything from HTTP, entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history, because there is no other road history of HTTP can walk by.
> These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web
That’s the entire contention, though. I don’t think the standards really had anything to do with it.
The only thing that even comes close is maybe DNS, since it ties web pages to specific organizations, so a page only continues to exist as long as an unbroken chain of custody keeps it there. But Gemini doesn’t even address that (ask IPFS and FreeNet how it’s going).
But mostly, browser vendors created the standards. And most of the current browser vendors became dominant browser vendors by using some other business to gain an edge in the market: Google used their ad business, sure, but before them it was Microsoft using their operating system to push their browser on people, and they largely just ignored the standards.
> entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history
But does Gemini actually do that? What stops your client from making ad-hoc extensions to gemtext?
No amount of writing, or lack thereof, can stop evil Gemini browser vendors from just ignoring what the text says. You need something else to make sure that power players don’t just ignore the rules you set out.
You’re entirely right; the sole reason for Gemini is to exclude people. It’s more than solutionism, it’s elitism. It’s some people hiding their content to the quote-unquote “cool” kids and claiming it’s a “better” solution just because the primary clients are terminal based.
Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.
Eh, it would be really nice to have back a Web where clicking a link couldn't result in loading a page that's tracking your mouse movements while you're on it.
IOW a web that's safe and user-controlled, again. Just a damn hypertext document browser that doesn't also bundle a spying suite and hand control of it to anyone by default. We should have realized when people started putting up troll pages that broke your computer simply by using JavaScript's normal capabilities, that we needed to seriously rethink including a scripting language with all kinds of ability to act against the user just because they followed a link, as part of the Web. We didn't do that, though, and instead we got gestures at everything.
I'm not sure Gemini's the right solution, but that would be a nice thing to have, which we do not have now.
Gemini really doesn't exclude anyone. It's not exactly difficult to use a Gemini to HTTP proxy and you don't lose anything except for access to some weird experiments with the client certificate features.
I mean, ignore away, but I don't think its fair to say that the sole reason for Gemini is exclusion of people.
Meh, everyone doesn't have to cater to the lowest common denominator all the time. Besides, I can't say I find the geminispehere very elitist or excluding after browsing it on and off for a year or so. There are no gatekeepers apart from accepting the technology itself.
Gemini folks maintain Gemini for themselves using their own hardware and their own time, so I think they can do whatever they think its best for them.
If they want to strip HTTP and remove all cool features it has, it's their problem, not ours.
If they want to treat content as text only, again, it's their problem, not ours.
If they want to publish their content as Gemini only, it's their content, not ours.
If they want to bikeshedding about internet protocols, it's their time, not ours.
Now, about Gemini folks being elitists and intentionally excluding people with their protocol, take a minute to think about what tech companies are doing.
Tech companies and many other companies that rely heavily on tech are making our society dependent more and more on online services, selling all kind of products and services that need an internet connection to work, even for basic features.
In a world where half of population does not have internet connection, and geek folks feel excluded by a protocol just because they don't like it, how can we name what tech companies are doing, if it is not elitism and exclusion?
It seems to me like the author is experiencing how the web itself feels if you try to step off the browser upgrade treadmill or use an older computer. A website refuses HTTP and you don't have recent TLS certs? Tough luck, pal. This page dynamically loads content with JS? Buzz off, guy using Links. Can't pay your online bills or join a video chat because you aren't using Chrome? Get with the times, grandma, and surrender to the new flesh!
There will come a point- and for some things we're already past it- where there is exactly one viable web browser, and it is controlled by a company that sells ads. This is why Gemini exists.
The post is a broad, and IMO, valid criticism. Though I'm not sure having a different protocol is a _huge_ problem. If Gemini ever got popular both backends and clients would add support.
I think the real issue, and the OP touches on it, is the text/gemini format. There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. Specifically, I'm talking about inline-links (though that isn't the only issue).
I wrote a server in elixir, and tried to convert Wikiversity's Introduction to Programming (1) both manually and automatically. I found the output unusable and couldn't come up with a case where I'd ever prefer/recommend it.
> There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini.
That's kind of what I've concluded too. I like the mission of gemini (and I believe the web is fundamentally broken and unrepairable), but I do feel like text/gemini flings way too far in the opposite direction. It's not a new pattern, I see this all the time: thing X is too complex and bloated and user-hostile, let's make a suckless thing Y. Y is minimalistic to a fault.
Making something that's too minimalistic or too complex is easy. Finding the right balance and making something that is small and simple yet still capable of covering wide use scenarios is an engineering challenge..
Since I agree with gemini's mission, I'm not going to complain too much about it. It's not exactly what I want, but if it encourages people to write content and deliver it in a form that is guaranteed not to have web's problems, I'm all for it, because I do stand to benefit from it.
I don't often use Gemini, but here's the thing that I think this misses and that Gemini does well:
If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast.
Yes, I can use NoScript, uBlock Origin with comprehensive lists, etc. and start to approach that level of simplicity... but every other link I click will likely be broken in weird and wonderful ways. In Gemini, they all work (provided the page still exists, of course). I think there's some value in that.
> If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast.
With a `text/gemini` content type over HTTP/1.1 you could just use cURL, wget or fancier stuff like w3m/lynx and get the exact same benefits but would not need to install yet another internet facing tool that may even get things wrong security wise (even with simple stuff a possibility).
Gemini's most distinguishing feature seems to be that it is considered feature complete. If everything goes as planned, even decades from now building a usable gemini client should be easily doable. Completely unlike web browsers which started off with fairly simple html but picked up a lot of bloat over the last few decades. This alone might make Gemini worth it.
I think the author is analyzing Gemini from a technical / engineering perspective, and of course, it doesn't make any sense.
I think Gemini lack of compatibility with the Web is its main feature, and I think people using Gemini want to create a separate new "community". The spirit is "we lost the web, it was taken over by corporate interests, let's accept it, leave it and create our new thing" (you can replace "corporate interests" by "normies" for some people I'm sure).
I think this is all fine, creating new communities/clubs/whatever when you are not happy with existing ones is good, maybe you'll be alone in it, maybe not, good for you.
I think the main problem I see here is that, if I understood properly, a Gemini link was shared on a web page. I don't think it is okay. You want to have your own private club, you got it. But please leave other clubs alone. It's perfectly okay that you don't want to communicate with me. But then don't.
"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?"
Because escaping the annoyances of the "modern web" may require escaping from the "modern browser". The changes users want to "modern browsers" will never be made. The vendors of these programs do not answer to users. They answer to web developers and advertisers. These are large, complex, insecure programs usually controlled by organisations that seek to profit from online advertising. The advertising focus leads to complex web pages. Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. (NB. Not "most", but "some".) Gemini, because of its limitations, allows users to retrieve resources without the need for one of these "modern browser" programs. If a new Content-Type was added to HTTP, what is the likelihood that other parties outside the "modern web browser" cabal would write small, simple, alternative browsers, e.g., aimed only at this Content-Type. Look at the market share, i.e., available selection, of web browsers. It is not diverse.
Whereas, writing a Gemini client is dead simple. A Gemini browser cabal where users have only a few choices and they are each controlled by corporations is unlikely.
Asking web developers to "please make simpler web pages, thanks", when the "modern browser" allows for complex pages and integration of advertising is not a succesful course of action. Most of these web developers answer to advertisers or to employers who answer to advertisers. They are not going to ditch the user annoyances, they are going to seek profits. Gemini seems to address this problem by making advertising difficult. Without the "modern browser", the possibilities for advertising are limited.
Similarly, asking web users to "please use a text-only browser", e.g., Links, when so many web pages try to use "modern" browser features that enable complex web pages is probably not a successful strategy for many users either. As a long-time Links user, that strategy has worked for me, though.
The only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It should be optional not mandatory.
>A Gemini browser cabal where users have only a few choices and they are each controlled by corporations is unlikely.
This is the key point. It is like the idea that you don't need the fastest person to escape from a chasing bear, you only need to be faster than the slowest person.
A user on the conventional web, is the slowest person here. And thus the success of Gemini browser is dependent on the existence of the slower person, that is, a large number of users available for exploitation, on the regular web, so that the business will leave the Gemini users (and the likes) alone.
HN actually implements this idea by remaining minimal. But even this place got overrun by shills these days, which means such piecemeal strategies will not work. So it makes perfect sense to do all the way and use a different protocol altogether..
> Not the type of simpler pages that some users want.
And yet most of these users don't use lynx...
> Only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense.
If you're only hosting 1 site, isn't the privacy leak negligible because there is 1:1 mapping from ip to domain so an attacker caneasily determine it.
Besides, in a system playing fast and loose with pki, its more like a do not disturb sign than an actual lock.
I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.
The author isn't considering how lack of features can be useful. Just like the lack of gotos in a language allows you to make many assumptions about a program, Gemini lacks just about every mechanism for fingerprinting and tracking that's become an inherent risk of accessing web pages, hugely reducing surface area for attacks.
Even lack of styling with every page looking about the same can be considered a feature, everything looks familiar and we aren't inconvenienced by bad design decisions.
I went down the Gemini rabbit hole last week (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/01/17/0800, and even coded my own minimalist server for it) and tend to agree that both its protocol and markup are oversimplified technical solutions in search of a problem, although I wouldn’t cast it so harshly.
It does feel like escapism/subculture of sorts, and I do believe that retreat from the Web is one of the underlying motivations, but (maintaining a relatively minimalist Markdown-backed site myself) I agree that there are no real technical reasons for it to exist (even Markdown support is something that is relatively easy to agree upon across browsers).
What I do like about it is the Lagrange browser, and the extremely legible reading experience—-I consume most of my content via RSS feeds and Reader Mode on websites I visit frequently, and I like the uniformity and predictability of the layout, as well as the lack of ads and distractions.
I’d be happy enough if Lagrange’s unfettered visual style became a sort of “forced Reader mode” in standard browsers…
Admittedly I up voted this not because I agree with it, but because I want more people talking about Gemini, both for and against it since it leads to healthy and constructive debate on a new technology.
I wondered the same thing... why invent a whole new thing? Making a web browser capable of displaying the Internet circa 1999 is not trivial but it is far, far, far easier than building a modern one.
It's about building an ecosystem. Its way easier to build a community of users and content which display on an 80 char terminal when the protocol only supports it and every link links to more content which follows the same restrictions.
IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.
I think because the inevitable result of that is that you constantly land on broken pages, just by following links, even if you start in some kind of enthusiast area that caters to such a browser.
Nah - Gemini FORCES people to use a very strict small surface area. Building on top of existing tech you would need to trust people to do it right, and that ain't something you trust.
It's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image.
If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors.
What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that?
Yep there would always be the temptation to say "well I need just one cookie" or "well I need just this bit of javascript" Gemini doesn't give you those options.
I think this is an interesting argument, but my question is why can't it just work in the browser I have with an extension? No matter what people say, modern websites with JS and HTML and such aren't going away. I can't just stick my head in the sand and only use this special browser since I use too many things that make my life better in meaningful ways that use the traditional protocols. Many of them wouldn't be possible using Gemini (I assume, I haven't dug in much).
That means if I want to use Gemini I would have to add a whole other browser to my computer and switch between the two while browsing which is super annoying. At that point I just won't bother.
What is the end game here? Do they want all websites to switch to Gemini? Do they expect people to use two browsers? Are they saying that anything that can't be built on Gemini should be a Native App?
> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different,
Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.
> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place
This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.
> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. [...] Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple [...]. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). [...] Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure [...] but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.
I used to consider myself a left-anarchist, though now I might better be considered a post-left anarchist nowadays. More radical, perhaps in PLA style, is to do away with this silly idea of "human scale"; we have computers, so let's do some computing, and get something interactive like the Web, but from an axiomatic design that is implementable in your lifespan, and ensures privacy and security properties from such axioms.
>This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web.
I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.
I can imagine a 40 year old retired tech guy living off his stocks raising his own chickens, self-declared left-libertarian socialist going "Oh, you use HTTP? That's nice. Corporate? I'm beyond it. I blog on Gemini". At least big corporate makes stuff ordinary people can actually use.
> Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians.
That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin.
The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".
Having a new protocol has value for the same reason HAM does. You hope that the character of the content itself will be interesting enough to be it's own subculture.
Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture.
It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations.
Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?
Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: <title>'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky.
Since there are apparently a few users here: What server would you recommend to get started? Any small tutorials on setting up a gemini site? Any links to gemini sites (maybe your own) you want to share?
> The question here shouldn’t be why not to use a subset of HTTP and HTML, but rather, why not build on top of HTTP with a different markup layer other than HTML. We have APIs using HTTP with JSON instead of HTML, for example.
As you can read in the Gemini FAQ, the reason that Gemini is not compatible with HTTP is that it should be possible to know that when you browse Gemini content, you will stay in gemini content.
If Gemini were compatible with HTTP, then when you make a Gemini website, you know that many people who use it probably are using HTTP browsers, so it will be easier to mix Gemini with HTTP links which means that Gemini users will be more exposed to the type of content that they were trying to avoid by using Gemini.
If Gemini instead is incompatible with HTTP, it will be harder for site owners to put a HTTP link on their Gemini site because they don't know how the user's client will handle that.
Maybe the best solution could have been something that makes it easy to get in but not as easy to get out.
I mean something like it could be possible to have a HTTP link to a Gemini site that would work in all browsers, but that Gemini site could not have a HTTP link.
I just don't know how you would make that.
Is there actually a good way for Gemini as a protocol to make linking to an HTTP site harder? I don't think the protocol actually limits the type of link on a Gemini page, and if I click on an HTTP link in an app my OS will just pop it up in a web browser without a problem. Yes I'd know the app changed, but I'm not sure that would really help guard me from following a link to the current web
It's not prevented by being its own protocol, only delayed. HTTP was pretty simple at the start, then it got popular and more features got added to satisfy more users. There is no law of nature or humans which prevents Gemini from being hijacked by others later if it becomes popular enough. And if it stays niche, then the current (developer-heavy) community can keep it as simple as they want.
There's something to be said about limits. Interesting things happen when you set limitations. The Oulipo group, made up of writers like Perec and Calvino, would intentionally set limits in order to spur creativity. What's the harm in having a web protocol like Gemini attempting to do the same thing? The modern web is bloated, captured, no longer uncharted land waiting to be explored. Why not refuse and set off into the waters of Gemini? What do you have to lose?
I just wrote a "Gemini is a little gem"[1] inspired by the OP article. I think that most criticism of Gemini kinda misses some important aspects of the ecosystem and ethos behind the protocol.
My understanding was that making it difficult to connect to, in order to keep out people who wouldn’t/couldn’t meet the bar, was an intended benefit and not an accident (whether that’s a good idea or not is an exercise for the reader, but the premise of this article seems to assume that it wasn’t the intent.)
What author hints at is a view of
Gemini community as ideologically monolithic
Internet Amish, refusing technology and
standards because they're opposed to
modern state of things: the opposing(author)
view is monoculture of Hypertext Web
subjugating all protocols will eventually dominate due user-friendly
and flexible nature of web stacks.
Its obvious Gemini isn't a tech solution
but a rebellion against corporate web
dominance that intentionally cripples
web experience for greater user control, but author tries to compare it
with familiar web sub-formats that are
characteristics of content: Gemini
isn't about content, its a form of
interaction that prescribes certain
limits that Internet Amish will feel
comfortable with, without introducing
too much overhead(like Tor and I2P).
Indeed, one could at least argue that gopher was a simpler protocol, gemini makes short work of that, too, and leaves it to be only an incompatible and less capable https protocol with some other convention for the markup.
I entirely agree that there's no good reason not to use HTTP[s] as a transport for textual information, which is kinda what it's made to do anyway..
I'd argue against a gemini content-type, I'd get as far away from the association with gemini as possible.
text/feather is a better content-type, it makes it clear that it's text, with a feather-light structure imposed on it.. That structure should probably be very little more than support for line breaks and hyperlinks.
OP is correct. HTTP/1.1 requires the Host header (1). The client must send it, and the server must reject requests without it. Some implementations simply don't follow the standard. For example, you can test this on twitter.com, which appears to be correctly following the specification.
You can build a minimal browser that uses HTTP and only renders special markdown files. You can use the Accept header to send special markdown to these minimal browsers and minimal HTML to normal browsers. A new protocol is unnecessary to accomplish the goals you mentioned.
Gemini is so silly. The logic is basically as follows:
- people are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular.
- instead lets make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. But people have to voluntarily use our system. For some reason people will use gemini voluntarily even though they refused to voluntarily use the web in a way we approve of in the first place.
- People are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular. Some do but it's impossible to divine it ahead of time before you follow a link and see what horrors lie behind.
- Instead let's make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. People have to voluntarily use our system. By virtue of having their content in our system, our users are guaranteed a comfortable experience.
I went down the Gemini rabbit hole 6 or 8 months ago and didn't really understand the solution it offered, but you're really missing the point here.
The idea isn't that consumers are using the web in a way that is disliked. The web is run by and for large corporations legally bound to do what is best for shareholders. The web allows those corporations to take advantage of consumers in ways that the average user doesn't understand and often wouldn't knowingly consent to, and in the process opens the door to entire classes of vulnerabilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Gemini may include a few unpopular assumptions and limitations, but a consumer never has to worry about any content on Gemini being vulnerable to script injections, malicious spyware,
or site silently mining crypto on your hardware. Tracking is still technically possible, as mentioned in the OP article, but in a very limited sense and only really at the level of page requests.
Gemini may be an over correction, but it at least starts (or continues) the conversation of whether a limited feature set is the most effective way to fix so many of the problems on the web today.
I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown.
Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.
If your grandma can install a web browser, she could install lagrange. If she knows how to navigate to 'facebook.com,' she can navigate to a gemini URL. If gemini got enough user share, lagrange or something similar would come installed on a computer by default. Gemini is not all that hard to use. From the user perspective, it is just like using Chrome, but the websites are more basic.
Let's be honest, 99% of what your grandma has to tell you could be put in an email with no intermediating parties. The web is totally unnecessary for that.
> The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma
I'd say the fact that your grandma has to use FB instead of publish on the Web itself is exactly why it sucks. What most people are using isn't really the Web, but apps that happen to (ab)use the Web. Many of which don't even use the Web for the app, but just redirect you to a mobile app instead.
Now I don't think Gemini is actually fixing any of this, but I do feel that the Web today is fundamentally broken and the lack of self-publishing is disheartening, though understandable given that the Web makes it far from easy.
I think a lot of the hostility people have towards Gemini comes from the frustration they have when they consider the absolutely massive scale of the modern web. Can a community of FOSS activists really fit the square peg of the modern web into the round hole of user-friendliness? Probably not. And I think on some level they understand this. Will governments around the world force user friendliness on major tech companies? Maybe, but probably not to the extent that satisfies us.
Browsers are a natural monopoly. The reason is scale. Modern browsers are just too fucking big. Bob from Seattle isn't taking down Google with his neato "classic browsing experience". Nobody uses Bob's browser.
So how do you rid the web of its surveillance scripts, telemetry-filled browsers, bad UX decisions, unnecessary bloat, manipulative algorithms and lowest-common-denominator pandering? Well, Gemini says you don't. This is where people get red in the face. How could you possibly give up the good fight!? Just visit websites that aren't trash! Well, sure. I do visit blogs that treat me well, but there's a reason most of the web is garbage. Because garbage makes money. Individual consumer decisions make up an aggregate of consumption behavior that shifts the market towards certain development patterns. "Surveillance capitalism" could also be called "you get unlimited entertainment for free, and in exchange I keep the receipts" capitalism. That's a pretty good deal for most people. And that's why the business model keeps getting copied. It's scalable, popular, practical, and yields the highest number of consumers of your product. It would literally be irrational for a business NOT to do this. When you block 30 trackers on someone's recipe page, you're taking a square peg and trying to force it into a round hole. That isn't a recipe page, but a tracking page that happens to have a recipe on it. Making it "work" is contrary to its intended purpose.
So Gemini basically asks the question "what if we made a protocol that is architecturally predisposed to being user-friendly?" Gemini is a thought experiment in making a tool that's for a particular thing, for a particular group of likeminded people. What if instead of accepting dependancy on a browser duopoly, the protocol allowed anyone to hack up a browser in an afternoon? What if the protocol was designed to make surveillance capitalism an impossible business model? What if instead of trying to turn the corporate web into FOSSweb and bringing everyone into web utopia, developers created their own web that caters to user-friendly experiences for the niche minority of people who actually care about all that high-minded moralizing?
So is Gemini useless? Maybe for you. But I found interesting blogs and I use the Lagrange client, which is very pretty. I enjoy reading peoples' thoughts on philosophy, economics, science, environmentalism, all kinds of things. And for the first time in decades, I feel like I'm actually surfing the web again, as I browse feed aggregators and click on random links, digging through post after post on all kinds of cool things. And it feels like a relaxing break from having to worry about what scripts may be on the sites I browse. I just click and go.
Will Gemini show me 4k videos of puppies being carried around in strollers at the park? No. Gemini will never fill that part of my browsing habits. But does it have to? Consumers have become so domesticated in their mindset that one tool has to do it all. Once the tool turns out to work against you, you find yourself choosing between living in modern society or becoming a hermit. There is value in letting a hammer just be a hammer, and not trying to tape a saw on top of it.
square_usual|4 years ago
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!)
knowledge-clay|4 years ago
> 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!
duxup|4 years ago
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.
tpoacher|4 years ago
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.
foxfluff|4 years ago
The implication being that the web can be changed? I don't believe that, I believe the web is broken and it's only getting worse by the day. I'm not going to discourage you from trying though.
> If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website [..]
> If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it [..]
Sorry, these are not answers for me as a user. When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra. And I'm also guaranteed not to have to play whack-a-mole with ublock/umatrix trying to make the actual fucking content somehow load. That's where the value is! "In theory, someone could make a nice website. Some actually do" is nice but it does nothing for my browsing experience in general, because the next link is going to be crap again.
flohofwoe|4 years ago
> I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, ...
I guarantee this will only be true until it becomes popular enough to be a juicy target for the more - uhm - "business-oriented" people, it's not because of a restricted feature set.
Creating a technology which is intentionally uninteresting to business is an interesting angle of course which I can get behind ;)
Karrot_Kream|4 years ago
Sure, but there are plenty of users that are out there with different needs than you. Plenty of people out there don't deal with text well. One of the best parts of the web has been the ability to share images and simulations. Gemini space has no 3Blue1Brown and no Khan Academy. You can't watch a master cabinetmaker hand carve some dovetails. Gemini can't display textual math because the only thing text/gemini supports is UTF-8 text. There was talk in the early days of having screen readers and such but it's mostly gone unfollowed up on. There were a lot of debates about other accessibility things but the minimalist faction ended up winning over the pro-accessibility faction.
Gemini is only useful as a user if you're a software hacker who doesn't like math or images or videos or other media and have no accessibility needs. And it's borne out on Gemini space itself, as that is the core demographic of Gemini. To me Gemini feels more like a clique than an open space, where the text-loving cool-kids hang out. As far as internet projects that I feel are more inclusive (which isn't a high bar compared to Gemini), I find Usenet, Yggdrasil, and Secure Scuttlebutt better. There's a lot less waxing and waning about good and evil (and how the Geminauts are good, of course) on those places too.
grumbel|4 years ago
That seems more like an artifact of it not being popular than a feature of the protocol. If companies wanted to, they could just run native advertisement on Gemini just like they do elsewhere, just disguise the ad as regular news article and call it a day. Nothing stops them from putting banners on top of every page either or how about showing you an ad text before you are allowed to visit the actual content? You could even have a server-side wait time before you are allowed to move on from the ad.
Gemini just feels like rolling back the Web to an earlier stage without actually adding anything meaningful. If it ever got popular, it would devolve just the same as the Web already did, as it's nothing more than the same thing with a different paint job.
My personal take on this is that the core of everything wrong with the Web is the request–response nature of the protocol, as that allows to do a lot of crooked stuff on the server side, either intentionally (e.g. monitoring user activity, showing different content to different people) or unintentionally (e.g. causing broken links by servers going down). If the client gets plain-text or HTML really doesn't make a difference.
Another big issue is that publishing on the Web is far too complicated and expensive, which is why nobody is doing it anymore and instead relies on Facebook, Youtube and Co.
Something like IPFS feels like a much more valuable attempt as fixing the Web, as IPFS gets away from the request-response and turns the Web into a persistent data structure, that can't just be meddled with at the server side. It also makes publish substantially easier, as hosting is no longer tied to any single company, multiple people can host the same content and you don't have to pay and maintain a DNS record.
The part that is still missing with IPFS is a better replacement HTML. Stuff like pagination, image galleries, shopping carts, comments, etc. really need to become part of HTML, instead of stuff people hack together with Javascript or server side scripts. And how come we don't have an <advertising> tag yet?
Efforts in simplification should really happen on the users side, not in the protocol.
sangnoir|4 years ago
Yes - the slice you visit can be changed for you by using the right user-agent (as suggested in TFA).
> When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra
Why can't gemini space be defined by "Content-type: text/gemini" sites linking to each other and/or a limited functionality browser that doesn't render content you don't like?
akkartik|4 years ago
Given that the mainstream stack we all are dependent on has foundational problems as OP acknowledges, language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive. Surely anything Gemini does or doesn't isn't as damaging as status quo. So why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Criticism like this feels like the People's Front of Judea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA)
syntheticnature|4 years ago
That said, I think Gemini is intentionally designed to be ignored; an enclave or ghetto on the Internet, depending which connotations the speaker wants to have. Its success or failure will depend on its ability to have a self-sustaining community, which is interesting mainly in that discovering Gemini requires finding it via the web at the moment. I suppose there might be a Gemini-IRC connection, too; we will see if Gemini has IRC's longevity.
readthenotes1|4 years ago
krapp|4 years ago
Unfortunately, that something else will also be minimalistic, separatist and elitist, just less so than Gemini. It will probably use a strict subset of Markdown and be primarily text-focused and won't support scripting. But rather than "a thousand flowers" blooming we'll just have Gemini and "Gemini lite," because that would satisfy the needs of 99% of the potential audience for such things.
cxr|4 years ago
Because resources are not infinite. Gemini sucks the air out of the room.
> Sometimes an adage is trotted out that goes roughly like this: Welp, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing!¶ And sometimes that's true. It's at least widely understood to be true, I think.¶ What I don't see mentioned, ever, is that sometimes "it's better than nothing" is really, really not true. In some cases, something is _worse_ than nothing.
<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
> I think the real tragedy of Gemini is that although its existence is a reaction to a genuine problem[... i]t's another instance of a bad solution to a problem making that problem worse. This happens when bad solutions capture the attention of people concerned with and/or affected by the problem, and then they divert resources away[...] instead of allowing those resources to be better put to good use
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25811478>
piaste|4 years ago
That's... probably a poor figure of speech to use as encouragement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
sertraline|4 years ago
It does, it makes sense. These standards led us to everything that has ruined the old web, it led us to corporate controlled Internet where few major websites aggregate 80% of the content. It led us to scroll-jacking, bot-driven, located behind firewalls and captchas websites where genuine users can't even log in or post anything. It is why we have to use browsers that are more complex than entire operating systems just to support everything that can be done over HTTP. It led us to monopolies on web browsing - how many pages of web standards you have to implement and comply with if you want to make your own browser, just to visit google dot com? And at any time and moment all your efforts can be interrupted by security researchers who would tell you that your browser is insecure and now you have to comply with hundreds of pages of security standards as well, all because of how much can be done over HTTP. You can't even host a simple website over just HTTP without somebody telling you that you have to use HTTPS, even if you don't need it, because why not? You'll have the green icon!
And because of such monopolies, most websites also turned into "shells" that try to ruin your experience as much as possible so you go and download their app where they have more control without being restricted by browsers. And this, in turn, led most people going off the general web and staying inside their apps.
Sure, you can make your app that throws away most of HTTP-based bloat, but then someone forks and makes it support some of the bloat because they like it that way, and then someone else adds a bit more, and we are back at it again. You can't just "go back" and strip everything from HTTP, entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history, because there is no other road history of HTTP can walk by.
notriddle|4 years ago
That’s the entire contention, though. I don’t think the standards really had anything to do with it.
The only thing that even comes close is maybe DNS, since it ties web pages to specific organizations, so a page only continues to exist as long as an unbroken chain of custody keeps it there. But Gemini doesn’t even address that (ask IPFS and FreeNet how it’s going).
But mostly, browser vendors created the standards. And most of the current browser vendors became dominant browser vendors by using some other business to gain an edge in the market: Google used their ad business, sure, but before them it was Microsoft using their operating system to push their browser on people, and they largely just ignored the standards.
> entire thing has to be done in entirely different way where there is no possibility of repeating history
But does Gemini actually do that? What stops your client from making ad-hoc extensions to gemtext?
No amount of writing, or lack thereof, can stop evil Gemini browser vendors from just ignoring what the text says. You need something else to make sure that power players don’t just ignore the rules you set out.
foxfluff|4 years ago
Worse yet, it is precisely those standards that enable google dot com to discriminate and block your new browser. For your security, you know..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512
GoblinSlayer|4 years ago
barakm|4 years ago
Which is why nothing of value is lost by ignoring it, IMO.
brimble|4 years ago
IOW a web that's safe and user-controlled, again. Just a damn hypertext document browser that doesn't also bundle a spying suite and hand control of it to anyone by default. We should have realized when people started putting up troll pages that broke your computer simply by using JavaScript's normal capabilities, that we needed to seriously rethink including a scripting language with all kinds of ability to act against the user just because they followed a link, as part of the Web. We didn't do that, though, and instead we got gestures at everything.
I'm not sure Gemini's the right solution, but that would be a nice thing to have, which we do not have now.
LAC-Tech|4 years ago
Not every single thing has to include every single person on earth. If people want to use Gemini good for them.
adamrezich|4 years ago
> elitism (n.) the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society.
where does this idea come from? why can't people make their own spaces in their own corners of the Internet without being considered "elitist?"
is HN "elitist"? 4chan? Usenet? ZeroNet?
ygpa|4 years ago
I mean, ignore away, but I don't think its fair to say that the sole reason for Gemini is exclusion of people.
zppln|4 years ago
DarylZero|4 years ago
pedrogpimenta|4 years ago
akagusu|4 years ago
Gemini folks maintain Gemini for themselves using their own hardware and their own time, so I think they can do whatever they think its best for them.
If they want to strip HTTP and remove all cool features it has, it's their problem, not ours.
If they want to treat content as text only, again, it's their problem, not ours.
If they want to publish their content as Gemini only, it's their content, not ours.
If they want to bikeshedding about internet protocols, it's their time, not ours.
Now, about Gemini folks being elitists and intentionally excluding people with their protocol, take a minute to think about what tech companies are doing.
Tech companies and many other companies that rely heavily on tech are making our society dependent more and more on online services, selling all kind of products and services that need an internet connection to work, even for basic features.
In a world where half of population does not have internet connection, and geek folks feel excluded by a protocol just because they don't like it, how can we name what tech companies are doing, if it is not elitism and exclusion?
boring_twenties|4 years ago
It doesn't get any more "exclusionary" than that.
RodgerTheGreat|4 years ago
There will come a point- and for some things we're already past it- where there is exactly one viable web browser, and it is controlled by a company that sells ads. This is why Gemini exists.
latch|4 years ago
I think the real issue, and the OP touches on it, is the text/gemini format. There's a ton of content that would enrich Gemini (and that fits Gemini's mission) but that simply isn't usable in text/gemini. Specifically, I'm talking about inline-links (though that isn't the only issue).
I wrote a server in elixir, and tried to convert Wikiversity's Introduction to Programming (1) both manually and automatically. I found the output unusable and couldn't come up with a case where I'd ever prefer/recommend it.
(1) https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Programming
foxfluff|4 years ago
That's kind of what I've concluded too. I like the mission of gemini (and I believe the web is fundamentally broken and unrepairable), but I do feel like text/gemini flings way too far in the opposite direction. It's not a new pattern, I see this all the time: thing X is too complex and bloated and user-hostile, let's make a suckless thing Y. Y is minimalistic to a fault.
Making something that's too minimalistic or too complex is easy. Finding the right balance and making something that is small and simple yet still capable of covering wide use scenarios is an engineering challenge..
Since I agree with gemini's mission, I'm not going to complain too much about it. It's not exactly what I want, but if it encourages people to write content and deliver it in a form that is guaranteed not to have web's problems, I'm all for it, because I do stand to benefit from it.
ryukafalz|4 years ago
If I click a link in a Gemini browser, I know for sure that it will not start loading and running a ton of resource-intensive scripts. I know that it will not start autoplaying audio or video. I know that it will display fine in plain text, every single time - so it works in my terminal, in Emacs, on my phone, etc. And I know it will be fast.
Yes, I can use NoScript, uBlock Origin with comprehensive lists, etc. and start to approach that level of simplicity... but every other link I click will likely be broken in weird and wonderful ways. In Gemini, they all work (provided the page still exists, of course). I think there's some value in that.
tlamponi|4 years ago
With a `text/gemini` content type over HTTP/1.1 you could just use cURL, wget or fancier stuff like w3m/lynx and get the exact same benefits but would not need to install yet another internet facing tool that may even get things wrong security wise (even with simple stuff a possibility).
r3ndr|4 years ago
forty|4 years ago
I think Gemini lack of compatibility with the Web is its main feature, and I think people using Gemini want to create a separate new "community". The spirit is "we lost the web, it was taken over by corporate interests, let's accept it, leave it and create our new thing" (you can replace "corporate interests" by "normies" for some people I'm sure).
I think this is all fine, creating new communities/clubs/whatever when you are not happy with existing ones is good, maybe you'll be alone in it, maybe not, good for you.
I think the main problem I see here is that, if I understood properly, a Gemini link was shared on a web page. I don't think it is okay. You want to have your own private club, you got it. But please leave other clubs alone. It's perfectly okay that you don't want to communicate with me. But then don't.
1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago
Because escaping the annoyances of the "modern web" may require escaping from the "modern browser". The changes users want to "modern browsers" will never be made. The vendors of these programs do not answer to users. They answer to web developers and advertisers. These are large, complex, insecure programs usually controlled by organisations that seek to profit from online advertising. The advertising focus leads to complex web pages. Not the type of simpler pages that some users want. (NB. Not "most", but "some".) Gemini, because of its limitations, allows users to retrieve resources without the need for one of these "modern browser" programs. If a new Content-Type was added to HTTP, what is the likelihood that other parties outside the "modern web browser" cabal would write small, simple, alternative browsers, e.g., aimed only at this Content-Type. Look at the market share, i.e., available selection, of web browsers. It is not diverse.
Whereas, writing a Gemini client is dead simple. A Gemini browser cabal where users have only a few choices and they are each controlled by corporations is unlikely.
Asking web developers to "please make simpler web pages, thanks", when the "modern browser" allows for complex pages and integration of advertising is not a succesful course of action. Most of these web developers answer to advertisers or to employers who answer to advertisers. They are not going to ditch the user annoyances, they are going to seek profits. Gemini seems to address this problem by making advertising difficult. Without the "modern browser", the possibilities for advertising are limited.
Similarly, asking web users to "please use a text-only browser", e.g., Links, when so many web pages try to use "modern" browser features that enable complex web pages is probably not a successful strategy for many users either. As a long-time Links user, that strategy has worked for me, though.
The only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It should be optional not mandatory.
lonecom|4 years ago
This is the key point. It is like the idea that you don't need the fastest person to escape from a chasing bear, you only need to be faster than the slowest person.
A user on the conventional web, is the slowest person here. And thus the success of Gemini browser is dependent on the existence of the slower person, that is, a large number of users available for exploitation, on the regular web, so that the business will leave the Gemini users (and the likes) alone.
HN actually implements this idea by remaining minimal. But even this place got overrun by shills these days, which means such piecemeal strategies will not work. So it makes perfect sense to do all the way and use a different protocol altogether..
bawolff|4 years ago
And yet most of these users don't use lynx...
> Only complaint I have about Gemini is the absolute requirement for SNI. Not every IP addresss will necessarily be hosting multiple Gemini sites. Under the current protocol, even addresses hosting only a single site must require SNI. That makes no sense.
If you're only hosting 1 site, isn't the privacy leak negligible because there is 1:1 mapping from ip to domain so an attacker caneasily determine it.
Besides, in a system playing fast and loose with pki, its more like a do not disturb sign than an actual lock.
dexwiz|4 years ago
PinkMilkshake|4 years ago
English language keyboards are how you type Japanese.
Those keyboards you see with Katakana or Hiragana are rarely used in Japan, pretty much everyone uses romaji.
And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space.
ナイス！
piaste|4 years ago
What browser are you using? Mine (Vivaldi) displays the domain as its standard Punycode ASCII representation:
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com
lvass|4 years ago
Even lack of styling with every page looking about the same can be considered a feature, everything looks familiar and we aren't inconvenienced by bad design decisions.
rcarmo|4 years ago
It does feel like escapism/subculture of sorts, and I do believe that retreat from the Web is one of the underlying motivations, but (maintaining a relatively minimalist Markdown-backed site myself) I agree that there are no real technical reasons for it to exist (even Markdown support is something that is relatively easy to agree upon across browsers).
What I do like about it is the Lagrange browser, and the extremely legible reading experience—-I consume most of my content via RSS feeds and Reader Mode on websites I visit frequently, and I like the uniformity and predictability of the layout, as well as the lack of ads and distractions.
I’d be happy enough if Lagrange’s unfettered visual style became a sort of “forced Reader mode” in standard browsers…
ecliptik|4 years ago
elteto|4 years ago
Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.
Gigachad|4 years ago
IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.
brimble|4 years ago
dopidopHN|4 years ago
sergiotapia|4 years ago
DarylZero|4 years ago
It's similar to how, here in HN comments, you cannot embed a giant 300MB javascript advertisement monstrosity. Or even just an image.
If people could do that, then the space would be destroyed by malicious actors.
What if we eliminate HN and do the communication P2P? Where author hosts own content. How can I as author still guarantee you as reader that I won't do that?
One answer is to publish over Gemini.
wnolens|4 years ago
I had never heard about Gemini before this thread. So after skimming, I read the Gemini FAQ, then went back and re-read the article.
The author completely missed the point and began a technical discussion.
Kind of similar to that dev you work with that gets psyched about a solution, and doesn't stop to ask "do we need to solve this problem?"
throwawayboise|4 years ago
rPlayer6554|4 years ago
That means if I want to use Gemini I would have to add a whole other browser to my computer and switch between the two while browsing which is super annoying. At that point I just won't bother.
What is the end game here? Do they want all websites to switch to Gemini? Do they expect people to use two browsers? Are they saying that anything that can't be built on Gemini should be a Native App?
knowledge-clay|4 years ago
Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.
> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place
This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.
hayley-patton|4 years ago
I used to consider myself a left-anarchist, though now I might better be considered a post-left anarchist nowadays. More radical, perhaps in PLA style, is to do away with this silly idea of "human scale"; we have computers, so let's do some computing, and get something interactive like the Web, but from an axiomatic design that is implementable in your lifespan, and ensures privacy and security properties from such axioms.
https://applied-langua.ge/posts/terminal-boredom.html is a longer form writeup on this line of thought.
hammyhavoc|4 years ago
Barrin92|4 years ago
I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.
I can imagine a 40 year old retired tech guy living off his stocks raising his own chickens, self-declared left-libertarian socialist going "Oh, you use HTTP? That's nice. Corporate? I'm beyond it. I blog on Gemini". At least big corporate makes stuff ordinary people can actually use.
systemvoltage|4 years ago
That's interesting. People that I know (not personally, but the names I recognize) that are the most vocal about Gemini are self-proclaimed socialists. They want complete elimination of corporations and capitalism all-together, so ostensibly it might appear as 'left-libetarian' but quite the opposite. If we put on the liberatarian lenses, ideas of gemini are pretty cool but like many liberatarian ideas, they're impractical and often rooted in more emotion-than-substance. I admire the clean-slate approach sometimes because it gets rid of the cruft that we've built up over the years. It allows new tooling to be made with fresh eyes and hindsight. Think of it like the internet shedding off snake-skin.
The practical engineer in me says "We need to reinforce robustness, but also allow mad-scientists to do some wild experiments".
eternityforest|4 years ago
Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture.
It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations.
Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?
gerikson|4 years ago
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/
It's an aggregator of sorts, but with a bit of a twist.
Clients, for the terminal I recommend Amfora
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
and Lagrange is a great GUI client
https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE: <title>'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky.
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...
2pEXgD0fZ5cF|4 years ago
Since there are apparently a few users here: What server would you recommend to get started? Any small tutorials on setting up a gemini site? Any links to gemini sites (maybe your own) you want to share?
nurb|4 years ago
I haven't tried them out, but usually, awesome-* lists are good starting points.
https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services
reidrac|4 years ago
robalni|4 years ago
As you can read in the Gemini FAQ, the reason that Gemini is not compatible with HTTP is that it should be possible to know that when you browse Gemini content, you will stay in gemini content. If Gemini were compatible with HTTP, then when you make a Gemini website, you know that many people who use it probably are using HTTP browsers, so it will be easier to mix Gemini with HTTP links which means that Gemini users will be more exposed to the type of content that they were trying to avoid by using Gemini.
If Gemini instead is incompatible with HTTP, it will be harder for site owners to put a HTTP link on their Gemini site because they don't know how the user's client will handle that.
Maybe the best solution could have been something that makes it easy to get in but not as easy to get out. I mean something like it could be possible to have a HTTP link to a Gemini site that would work in all browsers, but that Gemini site could not have a HTTP link. I just don't know how you would make that.
_heimdall|4 years ago
captn3m0|4 years ago
KerrAvon|4 years ago
allanrbo|4 years ago
Jtsummers|4 years ago
tlamponi|4 years ago
jfax|4 years ago
barrikad|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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soapdog|4 years ago
[1]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html
j4yav|4 years ago
FrozenVoid|4 years ago
hammyhavoc|4 years ago
dusted|4 years ago
I entirely agree that there's no good reason not to use HTTP[s] as a transport for textual information, which is kinda what it's made to do anyway.. I'd argue against a gemini content-type, I'd get as far away from the association with gemini as possible.
text/feather is a better content-type, it makes it clear that it's text, with a feather-light structure imposed on it.. That structure should probably be very little more than support for line breaks and hyperlinks.
unknown|4 years ago
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nikisweeting|4 years ago
octoberfranklin|4 years ago
daveevad|4 years ago
I use the telnet trick often as debug step number one.
latch|4 years ago
(1) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4
LAC-Tech|4 years ago
gerikson|4 years ago
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/
ranger_danger|4 years ago
CyberRabbi|4 years ago
bawolff|4 years ago
- people are using web features in a way we don't like. They could do it in the way we like but that's unpopular.
- instead lets make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. But people have to voluntarily use our system. For some reason people will use gemini voluntarily even though they refused to voluntarily use the web in a way we approve of in the first place.
foxfluff|4 years ago
- Instead let's make it impossible to do things that we don't like in our system. People have to voluntarily use our system. By virtue of having their content in our system, our users are guaranteed a comfortable experience.
_heimdall|4 years ago
The idea isn't that consumers are using the web in a way that is disliked. The web is run by and for large corporations legally bound to do what is best for shareholders. The web allows those corporations to take advantage of consumers in ways that the average user doesn't understand and often wouldn't knowingly consent to, and in the process opens the door to entire classes of vulnerabilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Gemini may include a few unpopular assumptions and limitations, but a consumer never has to worry about any content on Gemini being vulnerable to script injections, malicious spyware, or site silently mining crypto on your hardware. Tracking is still technically possible, as mentioned in the OP article, but in a very limited sense and only really at the level of page requests.
Gemini may be an over correction, but it at least starts (or continues) the conversation of whether a limited feature set is the most effective way to fix so many of the problems on the web today.
DarylZero|4 years ago
dvt|4 years ago
I think that this premise is wrong. The modern web does not suck. FB is usable by my grandma (at 89 she posts semi-regularly!), but there's no way she could understand how to set up an IRC client, how to telnet into servers, or how to write markdown.
Of course, there's a lot of bad and a lot of baggage that comes with companies like Facebook and Google, but it's important to keep some perspective: there's also a lot of good. Gemini would literally make the web unusable for my grandma, and probably my mom, too.
tcmart14|4 years ago
cr__|4 years ago
throwawayboise|4 years ago
grumbel|4 years ago
I'd say the fact that your grandma has to use FB instead of publish on the Web itself is exactly why it sucks. What most people are using isn't really the Web, but apps that happen to (ab)use the Web. Many of which don't even use the Web for the app, but just redirect you to a mobile app instead.
Now I don't think Gemini is actually fixing any of this, but I do feel that the Web today is fundamentally broken and the lack of self-publishing is disheartening, though understandable given that the Web makes it far from easy.
croes|4 years ago
A lot of usable things suck.
ajioasfnokal|4 years ago
Browsers are a natural monopoly. The reason is scale. Modern browsers are just too fucking big. Bob from Seattle isn't taking down Google with his neato "classic browsing experience". Nobody uses Bob's browser.
So how do you rid the web of its surveillance scripts, telemetry-filled browsers, bad UX decisions, unnecessary bloat, manipulative algorithms and lowest-common-denominator pandering? Well, Gemini says you don't. This is where people get red in the face. How could you possibly give up the good fight!? Just visit websites that aren't trash! Well, sure. I do visit blogs that treat me well, but there's a reason most of the web is garbage. Because garbage makes money. Individual consumer decisions make up an aggregate of consumption behavior that shifts the market towards certain development patterns. "Surveillance capitalism" could also be called "you get unlimited entertainment for free, and in exchange I keep the receipts" capitalism. That's a pretty good deal for most people. And that's why the business model keeps getting copied. It's scalable, popular, practical, and yields the highest number of consumers of your product. It would literally be irrational for a business NOT to do this. When you block 30 trackers on someone's recipe page, you're taking a square peg and trying to force it into a round hole. That isn't a recipe page, but a tracking page that happens to have a recipe on it. Making it "work" is contrary to its intended purpose.
So Gemini basically asks the question "what if we made a protocol that is architecturally predisposed to being user-friendly?" Gemini is a thought experiment in making a tool that's for a particular thing, for a particular group of likeminded people. What if instead of accepting dependancy on a browser duopoly, the protocol allowed anyone to hack up a browser in an afternoon? What if the protocol was designed to make surveillance capitalism an impossible business model? What if instead of trying to turn the corporate web into FOSSweb and bringing everyone into web utopia, developers created their own web that caters to user-friendly experiences for the niche minority of people who actually care about all that high-minded moralizing?
So is Gemini useless? Maybe for you. But I found interesting blogs and I use the Lagrange client, which is very pretty. I enjoy reading peoples' thoughts on philosophy, economics, science, environmentalism, all kinds of things. And for the first time in decades, I feel like I'm actually surfing the web again, as I browse feed aggregators and click on random links, digging through post after post on all kinds of cool things. And it feels like a relaxing break from having to worry about what scripts may be on the sites I browse. I just click and go.
Will Gemini show me 4k videos of puppies being carried around in strollers at the park? No. Gemini will never fill that part of my browsing habits. But does it have to? Consumers have become so domesticated in their mindset that one tool has to do it all. Once the tool turns out to work against you, you find yourself choosing between living in modern society or becoming a hermit. There is value in letting a hammer just be a hammer, and not trying to tape a saw on top of it.
chaganated|4 years ago
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unknown|4 years ago
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