[HN Gopher] Bye, Gemini
___________________________________________________________________
Bye, Gemini
Author : saclark11
Score : 182 points
Date : 2023-08-08 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.makeworld.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.makeworld.space)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| How much sense does it make to use Gemini as compared to just
| keeping your HTTP implementation and your web pages markup as
| minimal as possible?
| [deleted]
| zamadatix wrote:
| The idea behind Gemini is that it's useful to have a clean
| partition where you know the social "crowd" matches a specific
| type. For someone to use it they've gone and installed
| dedicated software which intentionally limits itself to what
| this crowd likes to engage in. This signals they are interested
| in the same kind of space. The utility of the dedicated
| software is not in providing some other level of convenience,
| it's separate strictly so the user "crowd" stays separate.
| Otherwise I could just register gemini:// as an aliased
| protocol of HTTP and it'd work in normal browsers or gemini
| clients all the same.
|
| If Chrome supported Gemini tomorrow a significant portion of
| the user base would stop using it. Of course that's unlikely,
| Gemini's trust-on-first-use security model is something
| unlikely to be added net-new to a consumer focused browser.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > This signals they are interested in the same kind of space.
|
| It appears to have achieved this goal to perfection, since
| most posts in gemini are about ... gemini.
| kazinator wrote:
| It matters to some people that their preferences are enforced
| by the tooling.
|
| How much sense does it make to switch to some immutable data
| structure or even a language with support for such rather than
| just not mutating the one you have? (Works for me.)
|
| There is a philosophy behind Gemini which is to fundamentally
| simplify the web, not jut individual web pages that opt-in.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Readers don't need a heavy web browser at all.
|
| Even for a minimal html, everyone uses a different "minimal"
| subset.
| reidrac wrote:
| Gemini also removes cookies, actual forms (there's a way to
| submit text, but not as a form), and any possibility of
| extending the protocol.
|
| It throws the baby with the water, a bit.
|
| Despite all that, it is still useful, but not enough to ignore
| all that it could have had but is missing.
| asoneth wrote:
| No site is an island. Even if I keep my own website's
| implementation minimal I still end up interacting with the rest
| of the internet via web pages with less minimal markup.
|
| However, if you also had a like-minded community of similarly
| minimal websites, a mechanism to minify websites, search
| engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites, and
| a social convention of avoiding linking to any website unless
| it was minimal (or minifiable) then you'd end up with something
| like the Gemini community.
|
| In fact, I suspect something like that will supplant Gemini in
| practice. Browsers already have reader modes and some search
| engines allow you to block certain domains. I could easily
| imagine search engines or browsers providing greater end-user
| control over this sort of thing in the future.
| eterps wrote:
| > search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable)
| websites
|
| I actually like that idea.
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| > search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable)
| websites
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu tries to be this, and is now
| being worked on full time by its creator.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Also https://wiby.me
| whartung wrote:
| Indeed. What would it be like if websites were designed to
| "look good" using a text based browser, like Lynx?
|
| In the early days I used to use Lynx, and it was actually
| really good. It was always quite fast, easy to navigate around
| with the keyboard, able to zip through things like navigation
| menus quickly.
|
| Didn't work to well with image maps! (A thing back in the day),
| but it was a nice experience.
| nologic01 wrote:
| The endless dropdown menus people stuff websites with spoil
| the fun as there is no nice way to render that.
| ubertaco wrote:
| I love Gemini, and I'm bummed a bit that the maintainer of my
| favorite CLI gemini client (amfora) doesn't have interest in it
| anymore.
|
| For me, Gemini's a sweet spot.
|
| Yes, Gemini is slow. I like that. I don't need dopamine hits of
| constant content, even if I _have_ become accustomed to them (he
| said, on a website designed to have fresh links for fresh
| dopamine hits all the time). I like a slow "let me check and see
| what's come in across the past day or two or three", with the
| selection being pretty manageable -- a dozen or so posts.
|
| I like the lack of tracking, the lack of JS, the lack of CSS. It
| means that we're focusing on the words on the screen, not the
| gizmos and flair around the edges. It's plaintext at its best,
| IMO. You write your stuff, I'll set my client to render it
| however I like to read it, everyone's happy.
|
| Yes, everything so far is just personal blogs. I love that. It's
| more genuine, because it's just people talking about what matters
| to _them_ -- not what "their audience" wants, or what drives
| engagement -- and that's where the real good writing lives. I
| don't want someone to give me some AI-generated spew so that they
| can get pageviews for ads, or to give me soulless marketing copy
| so they can promote their brand so they can get pageviews for ads
| or merch-affiliate links. I just want to pop into a little corner
| and hear someone tell me something about a subject they care
| about, and have my own world enriched by it.
|
| My only complaint about Gemini, so far, is that I do wish
| discussion was more feasible. I've seen some duct-taped-together
| comment systems, but it'd be nice if that were more of an easy-
| to-use and easy-to-set-up thing.
| troupo wrote:
| Gemini threw out the baby with the bathwater out while chasing
| simplicity.
|
| The impossibility of inline media makes a huge amount of
| otherwise interesting content (tutorials, travel blogs, museum
| sites, personal hobby sites) boring and tedious.
|
| The impossibility of "easy-to-use and easy-to-setup" commenting
| system stems from the same "so simple as to be nearly unusable"
| ideology.
| Endy wrote:
| I tried to get interested in Gemini, I really did. The problem is
| that a lot of it is self-hosted, and there isn't really a great
| index or search engine that I've seen. That self-hosting means
| I'm locked out of participating for the time being, and the lack
| of search means it's hard for me to find anything of real value.
|
| I want to see it grow. But right now, it's inferior in my eyes to
| even the current Gopher hole hosters online today.
| textprotocol wrote:
| uprotocols are fun. try text://protocol for that truly
| minimalistic avant-garde experience. [01]
|
| [01] https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main
| ilaksh wrote:
| I loved playing around with Gemini. Something loosely along those
| lines can definitely work. Who knows what will become popular in
| the future. Extreme web page bloat leaves the door open.
|
| Here are a couple of other alternative ideas for the web:
|
| https://freenet.org/
|
| https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet (an idea, not implemented)
| airstrike wrote:
| IMHO the problem with Gemini is that "a subset of the web's
| functionality" is a very broad definition and it's hard to find
| consensus on whether that subset corresponds to 1% or 99% or
| something in the middle
|
| I think the ideal project starts closer to the 99% but allows for
| graceful degradation down to 1% with little beyond a TUI, some
| colors and hyperlinks. That requires creating the right
| infrastructure for servers to offer a "stack" of content built
| something like (text + (hyperlinks + (images + (css + (video +
| (animations + (...)))). Clients can then be developed to handle
| whatever portion of that stack they want to.
|
| This at least has the advantage of lowering switching costs for
| _users_ who want to explore this "new web" while also allowing
| nerds like me to experience the web "the right way" with no
| distractions
|
| However, the elephant in the room is that is is hard to imagine
| content creators would be in any way incentivized to think about
| their content in terms of that stack. Reddit just wants to force
| everyone to use their app, text-and-hyperlinks be damned. There's
| a reason RSS feeds have died.
| airstrike wrote:
| _(Also from another recent HN discussion on Gemini I was left
| with the impression that the project 's direction was defined
| in a pretty heavy-handed way, and I think its chilling effect
| has likely further diminished the chances Gemini has to
| succeed)_
| ilyt wrote:
| > IMHO the problem with Gemini is that "a subset of the web's
| functionality" is a very broad definition and it's hard to find
| consensus on whether that subset corresponds to 1% or 99% or
| something in the middle
|
| The problem is that it consist of below 1%. Markdown (let's say
| some fancy variants with tables) + hyperlinks + multimedia
| gives you a lot. Cut multimedia and now not even "look what I
| made" blog makes sense on it. Cut on basic formatting features.
| and you can't even make it nice to read
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I do think Gemini suffers from a dearth of interesting content,
| which is interesting because the content you find on there is
| pretty much exactly what you would expect and the things that
| feel missing are the things we often bemoan about the web.
|
| If you look at an aggregator like [0] you see 10-15 new posts a
| day, which actually isn't a bad level of activity. But it's all
| just people's personal blogs. Which is fine and, again, is
| probably how it is intended to be. But unless you have a personal
| connection to these people or happen to be intensely interested
| in all the same things as them, it's difficult to stay interested
| in their personal blogs.
|
| Things you don't really find in Geminispace (unless it is
| mirrored or proxied from the web):
|
| - news or serious journalism
|
| - any kind of social media
|
| - any kind of interactive content
|
| - any kind of multimedia content
|
| Some of that is due to inherent and very intentional limitations
| of the protocol. Some of it is just due to the community being
| much smaller (ie, the web has plenty of interesting text-only
| content that could be on Gemini, but is not).
|
| I still like Gemini and will continue to browse it, and it's
| important to point out again that it was never intended to
| replace the web. But I remember to check in on it less frequently
| now and it seems I am not alone.
|
| 0: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I looked into Gemini. I love some of the core tenets of the
| philosophy (Drew Devault), but it quickly dawned on me after
| reading some of the stuff on there: I won't name the ideology
| but it almost feels like Gemini was developed to propel it.
| There is not much diversity of ideas.
|
| I think clans/cults/whatever are fine. Subcultures are ok. But
| you can't pretend to create an "open" platform only to have the
| whole thing designed to be the opposite.
|
| I feel the same about Mastodon. Cool tech, undeniably. An echo
| chamber, regretfully.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I feel the same way about Mastodon. The founding generation
| of that ecosystem has very strident views about certain
| matters that are foreign (and in the sense of "never even
| think about it", let alone "I disagree") to probably over 90%
| of the world population. Expectations are that the bulk of
| entrenched Mastodon instances are going to ban federations
| with instances that permit discussion beyond what that
| founding cohort is comfortable with, so here, too, the
| technology almost exists to propel ideals, too.
| jl6 wrote:
| My experience with Mastodon was that you can choose
| between:
|
| * Echo chamber islands with purity spirals that enforce the
| banning of Problematic instances
|
| * "Free speech" instances where all the refugees from the
| above go, but which are just a different flavor of cesspool
|
| Moderation is hard.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah likewise. One of the reasons (well I'm an old-time
| SSB fan) I'm interested in Bluesky is that defederation
| isn't really a thing and so the failure modes of
| splintering communities isn't as big of a deal. When
| individuals have more power and mods have less, the
| impact of politics on the community would probably be
| more diffuse. Or that's the hope anyway. The mods = gods
| era of the internet was always a colorful one.
| sph wrote:
| > I won't name the ideology
|
| Not sure what you're referring to here, but to me the
| ideology behind Gemini is self-indulgent navel gazing. Sure
| it's neat, but that's it. It's literally just a subset of
| something, but no emergent property or benefit is borne from
| this shrinkage, so the end result is not very interesting.
|
| That's fine honestly, I don't think the authors wanted to
| change the Internet with Gemini, I'm more surprised by the
| early adopters that are now suffering from post-hype
| depression, like the author.
| ilyt wrote:
| No wonder really. Markdown + images fits many use-cases, worse-
| than-markdown without any multimedia just don't. It doesn't
| even work for blogs, if you want to brag about what you did, no
| pics, if you want to have any viewer interaction whatsoever, no
| dice.
|
| Requiring some wanky app to even enter it doesn't help the
| issue
| floren wrote:
| > the content you find on there is pretty much exactly what you
| would expect
|
| Mostly blog posts about Gemini and Gemini software, in my
| experience...
|
| Maybe it's time for Mercury, an even simpler protocol: you open
| a TCP connection, the server sends back a chunk of bytes
| consisting of ASCII 0x20 through 0x7e (and newlines). Clients
| must print the response to the screen verbatim. You "link" to
| other sites by including a hostname or IP address in the
| document; the user can then type or copy-paste that into the
| client's address field.
| pram wrote:
| This makes me think of a gag from the Simpsons, where the
| only dialogue coming from a ham radio was "I have a ham
| radio"
| eternityforest wrote:
| Make the protocol so boring you have to write about something
| other than the software? It might work!
|
| I wonder if the mostly proprietary OSes and browsers has
| anything to do with the early internet's appeal. Open source
| invites you to improve and customize the software. Does the
| ability to do so change the psychology and put the focus more
| on the app itself? Is it related to entropy, where software
| has lots of other possible ways that it could have been done
| differently, all of which sit in ones mind like alternate
| timelines distracting from the present?
|
| With open software software(Aside from ultra minimal software
| defined by a specific ideal) you can always improve it with
| some effort, so perhaps it's always disappointing to some
| degree especially to anyone who knows how to code?
|
| It's one of the only things people do where there are
| frequent updates. A textbook might go years between editions.
| Painters will usually return to similar themes and subjects
| when they feel they could do better rather than redo a
| painting verbatim. Software is never done, and software
| people are never done thinking about it.
|
| How can we get the same results in FOSS that we had on the
| early internet, when people just said "it works, lets use
| it!" without using ultra minimal stuff that once again is
| only interesting to tech tinkerers, and doesn't really do
| much?
| floren wrote:
| neocities.org is way more interesting if you want to see
| people just building sites for stuff they're interested in
| qingcharles wrote:
| When the Web first came online in the early 90s the only web
| sites I remember were "How to write HTML."
|
| It took me about a year of having a browser installed before
| I started using the Web.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I recommend port 17.
| floren wrote:
| Hush, this is a new movement, a rejection of old bloated
| protocols like Gemini and HTTP!
|
| Also RFC 865 limits the QOTD response to 512 octets which
| isn't nearly enough.
| eternityforest wrote:
| On the early internet, it was all personal sites.
|
| But we had attempts at journalism and tons of interactive
| content on those sites.
|
| When there was no social media, people learned HTML to
| communicate, and we got all the variety of the early web.
|
| Now people make sites because they like coding, and use them to
| communicate about coding. Or they use social media and comment
| on random drama.
|
| The internet eats it's own refuse like AI does. Without real
| life stuff to talk about it's pretty terrible. Video games were
| the main interesting internet native subject, aside from tech
| itself in the pure sense, but gaming culture has become almost
| a 4chan offshoot, less interesting to everyone else, while the
| games themselves are full of DLC.
|
| Modern computers are fast enough for bloated sites. I don't
| think the issue is tech(unless you're really unhappy with the
| privacy situation). It's that all the content is made by people
| who spend all day on the internet, and it's all about tech.
|
| And tech is just going in circles. With less real world
| connection, everyone just wants to be better at writing code,
| to try new languages, etc. It's philosophy as much as real
| tech, or maybe like some modern cyberpunk version of
| meditation, they're all just seeking simplicity, and it doesn't
| make much sense to people who didn't join the scene because
| they loved elegant ideas.
|
| It's like reading 10 biographies and writing about them and
| your experience reading them, vs the old Internet where you
| went and did stuff and wrote about your life.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Who is everyone? There are proportionally very few coders in
| the world and even fewer making their own sites compared to
| non coders.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "It's that all the content is made by people who spend all
| day on the internet, and it's all about tech."
|
| And "news" services that utilise the internet are more often
| than not biased toward so-called "tech" news.
|
| It's like the internet is constantly promoting itself.
|
| Then one looks at the advertising. The businesses that
| advertise the most are the ones who are entirely internet-
| based.
|
| I'm not suggesting this is a new trend. Definitely not. But I
| had hoped it would change.
| 3np wrote:
| Just noting the meta of this commentary being a common
| reoccurency on this very tech-news commentary forum ;)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > On the early internet, it was all personal sites.
|
| Assuming you mean WWW, this is patently false:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor.
| ..
| anthk wrote:
| False, there are lots of gemini places, look at them at
| gemini://medusae.space, and most of them are not Gemini
| related.
|
| Ditto in the Spanish geminiverse:
| gemini://caracolito.mooo.com/deriva
|
| On news, well, seriously, RSS' are not web pages and often work
| better than the pages themselves, and gemini://gemi.dev it's
| doing a great job. When a gemini service as Gemi shows up the
| actual content at 5% of the size of the actual web page,
| something it's really wrong with the web.
| eterps wrote:
| I like the idea of Gemini, but having just a subset of the web's
| functionality is not enough.
|
| While it might not be a perfect analogy, many prefer using the
| terminal/shell/TUIs is because it is more powerful and efficient
| than the alternatives.
|
| And even though I appreciate Gemini, I wouldn't say that it is
| more powerful and efficient. Granted, that's not its goal either.
| [deleted]
| throw10920 wrote:
| > And even though I appreciate Gemini, I wouldn't say that it
| is more powerful and efficient. Granted, that's not its goal
| either.
|
| Correct! Gemini is a mix between an art project and a political
| statement. It doesn't, and is not meant to, provide significant
| value over the web - a quick look at the specs makes this
| pretty clear.
|
| If you view it through this lens instead, it's pretty neat,
| though.
| gatane wrote:
| There is always a song: https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8
| bennylava wrote:
| [dead]
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| Quite literally: the real Gemini was the friends we made all
| along
| ThrowAway1922A wrote:
| I think Gemini could have been fun for vintage and low powered
| systems, but then they slapped a mandatory TLS requirement on top
| of it. That's the entire reason I have no interest in Gemini.
|
| It doesn't provide anything that HTTP or Gopher can't. I don't
| see the point.
| sph wrote:
| TLS was unnecessary, I agree, but if it was plain text it would
| not have been more interesting to me, a computer nerd, than the
| current iteration.
|
| I might have written a client, and just forgot about it because
| a plain text internet is really not very interesting for any
| demographic.
| ufmace wrote:
| I'm pretty sympathetic to this. I want to like the idea of
| Gemini, but it currently doesn't have, and is difficult to
| impossible to build, anything to really draw users away from the
| conventional web.
|
| I think the fundamental idea of a new protocol that's much more
| limited than the current HTTP + HTML + JS web platform still has
| merit, but Gemini is just too limited to get going. It's tough
| though to design something that's flexible and feature-full
| enough to be really useful and not too hard to implement, but not
| so much that it will inevitably be extended to be basically what
| the web is now.
|
| Thinking about it a bit, I think the idea for required TLS and
| client certs as the only way to ID users is good, as is lack of
| support for arbitrary HTTP headers and JS. I think what really
| kills a lot of potential functionality is the total lack of
| support for sending any data back to the server by anything other
| than basically query params. I think it ought to be possible for
| somebody to build a Super-Gemini that just support some
| equivalent of POST and some simple equivalent of HTML forms in
| addition to what it had, and should still be pretty easy to
| implement.
| azornathogron wrote:
| See the "titan" protocol.
|
| https://transjovian.org/titan/page/The%20Titan%20Specificati...
|
| It's "intended" to post a whole page/resource, but obviously it
| could be used to send an arbitrary blob just like an HTTP POST
| request.
| translucyd wrote:
| That's actually pretty nice!
| ufmace wrote:
| That site appears to be completely down, can't even find much
| of anything under archive.org.
| em-bee wrote:
| when i consider alternatives to http, i find that the main thing
| http is missing is a directory index at protocol level. it should
| be possible to browse the structure of a site without having to
| load and interpret a full html document. an index would help
| discovery of the site, especially, but not only for users of
| accessibility tools.
|
| those who don't like html can easily host only text files if they
| want to. the main limitation here is the browser lacking a two
| pane directory/view mode
| seanhunter wrote:
| This article really resonates with me. It lots of ways I want to
| like gemini but when it really comes down to it the content just
| isn't very good.
|
| Secondly, the restrictions seem great until you really could use
| a diagram or an actual equation or a million other things that
| aren't just plain markdown basically.
|
| I am squarely in the wheelhouse of people who should be into
| gemini. I _love_ the terminal. I have used vim for 25 years and
| emacs for a good 5 or so years before that, I have used textmode
| browsers and extensions like vimium etc to make my non-textmode
| browsers be more texty. My own website is almost entirely just
| plain text.
|
| If it was obsidian-style markdown (ie including embedded images,
| latex and tables and especially diagramming using something like
| mermaid or excalidraw) it would be amazing[1] but as is, it's
| just not quite enough to actually be used for anything other than
| what's on there which is basically people just navelgazing or
| talking about gemini itself.
|
| [1] And I expect that slightly less restrictive palette would
| make it attractive to a lot more folks to produce content for and
| therefore it would be a lot less like a barren technohipster
| wasteland as at present.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Dearth of content and politics aside, it is really nice on
| mobile.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| i love the spaces that gemini created, but agree that (from a
| protocol and technical standpoint) gemini and gemtext were more
| "frustratingly inferior" rather than "elegantly simplified".
| peatmoss wrote:
| This is my favorite take--constraints can breed innovation, but
| usually only when the constrained system doesn't already have a
| complete substitute that isn't constrained.
|
| I'd love to see a system that went hard on elegance. If we're
| tilting at windmills, the alternative to web I'd like to see,
| is the fully Scheme web: S-exprs for content, DSSSL for
| styling, and Scheme for logic.
|
| It was the web we'd have had in a different timeline.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Or it could use PostScript for ... everything.
| woah wrote:
| what was this, just MySpace for 30-something software developers?
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's still around, but I think you got the gist.
| poopbutt7 wrote:
| Gemini felt to me like the web's quiet cabin on a lake. I'd view
| through a terminal emulator on a Mac Classic.
|
| The lack of infinite content makes it peaceful and manageable.
| The lack of search (or maybe it exists and I just didn't care to
| find it) makes finding little haunts and communities more
| rewarding.
|
| It's just some personal blogs about synthesizers or cereal
| recipes- but it's genuine and not people trying to build a brand.
| No one is trying to sell you anything. It's felt totally
| uncorrupted.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > Gemini is a reaction to bloated modern websites
|
| Correction: it is an _over_ reaction to bloated modern websites.
| Interesting in various ways. Artificial constraints in an era of
| gratuitous excess can be useful to trigger creativity but my
| sense is that the territory Gemini revisited is simply too well
| trodden. Not a particularly fertile ground to seed an alternative
| universe. Heraclitus said, "You cannot step into the same river
| twice, for other waters are continually flowing on."
|
| Added thought: The vision of a lean web is more than valid, but
| it needs to add something new and exciting even while it
| subtracts a lot of useless bloat.
| snvzz wrote:
| Gemini might go away, but Gopher is forever.
| anthk wrote:
| Actually both communities overlap. Also, Gopher sucks in any
| device smaller a DEC terminal. Gemini gives you methods to
| display your media on nearly any size of screen.
| NikkiA wrote:
| Bah, gopher is just a lousy hytelnet wannabe.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I don't know, Gopher being removed from Firefox and Chrome over
| the last few years kinda disagrees with that sentiment.
| kristopolous wrote:
| FTP was even removed 2 years ago.
|
| Really, look that up.
| lolinder wrote:
| The fact that we'd have to look it up is why it was
| removed. I haven't used FTP in at least a decade--scp does
| the trick for my server management needs, HTTP is
| sufficient for download-only use cases, and Dropbox-style
| applications have supplanted FTP for shared files. FTP is
| more general than any of these three replacements, but it
| isn't ideal for any one of the use cases.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I only use X, YouTube, Insta, and TikTok. Browsers should
| just refuse to connect to any other site besides those
| lolinder wrote:
| I take it you have a use case for FTP still that's not
| yet been supplanted by other, more specialized tools?
| Please share, rather than snarking.
| Minor49er wrote:
| To name a few, I interact with a number of sites on
| shared hosting that have been using FTP for years. I also
| work with a data server that primarily interfaces with
| its data store through FTP. It also used to be easier to
| just host an FTP server and manage its access independent
| of a website, but still link to it in a browser where
| people who are not technically inclined could browse and
| interact with files without needing a separate dedicated
| client. Even for me, it would be simpler to just see an
| FTP file listing in a browser sometimes
|
| The point is that browsers used to be able to browse the
| Internet, but major players such as Google have been
| working hard to limit all of these things to just HTTPS.
| Excusing things away by saying "well _I_ don 't use it,
| so it's useless" has only helped to narrow this path
| mattl wrote:
| Web browsers aren't internet browsers and shouldn't be.
| There's way too many things on the internet for them to
| do a good job anyway.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Exactly right. This is why we must continue to fight for
| our FAANG-only locked-down future!
| mattl wrote:
| Netscape used to come with a browser, a mail client, a
| newsreader, an HTML editor.
|
| We've moved beyond that now, why worry about a browser
| being able to read Gopherspace or Gemini pages? Putting
| those into dedicated browsers of their own has been the
| perceived action for some time.
| mattl wrote:
| Web browsers should stick to web browsing and other tools
| should handle other protocols at this point in time.
| distcs wrote:
| You can still connect to Gopher server using "proper" Gopher
| clients, so the parent commenter is still right that Gopher
| is not going away. But then Gemini too is not going away.
| These niche protocols will always have their niche
| communities using their niche clients so they are probably
| going to survive even if they remain obscure.
| rglullis wrote:
| I am going to give my cynical self a pat in the back. Back in
| March 2022 I was calling out Gemini as a fad that had no reason
| to exist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802376
| devonnull wrote:
| The author of that post makes a good point: using Gemini _offers
| no advantage over how I already use the Web._ I think that goes
| for more than a few people, and not just the author.
|
| Admittedly, I've never dived deeply into Geminispace, but it's
| never held my interest. Like the author of that post, I can get
| all of what I need online with my web browser and RSS feed
| reader.
|
| But, hey, if you enjoy using Gemini (as a reader or a creator or
| both), then stick with it!
| translucyd wrote:
| I love the idea of Gemini. But I also find myself forgetting it
| exists. Maybe the addictive way we do web design this days is the
| culprit. But, honestly, maybe is just the content quality.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| >I love the idea of Gemini
|
| Yeah, same. I think it's just that so much of the Internet
| comes to you now (via social feeds, emails, or RSS feed), the
| idea of surfing to find stuff is mostly dead to us. And you
| have to fire up a different browser to do it? Just too easy to
| forget.
|
| There will never be a killer app for Gemini, and pretty much
| anyone who's good enough to be worth following will never fully
| commit to the protocol.
|
| I like that it exists, but that's about it.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Maybe, once you take out the rose colored glasses, the past
| internet wasn't so great?
|
| I remember being a kid and having a blast on the 2000's
| internet, but it was really hard to bump into a really good
| site. Tbh most of them were kinda crappy.
|
| Like with past friends and past games: I missed the good times,
| but if I tried to recreate today the same things like I did in
| the past, I realized that everything changed: Some friends
| stayed friends, but some others simply didn't. And some
| interests didn't interest me anymore.
|
| I also realized that what I don't really miss the old internet.
| I miss being a kid, having all the time in the world in my
| hands, with total freedom to play with the most absurd
| activities with zero regards about productivity and being
| amazed with the most simple things.
| starkparker wrote:
| > I remember being a kid and having a blast on the 2000's
| internet, but it was really hard to bump into a really good
| site. Tbh most of them were kinda crappy.
|
| > Like with past friends and past games: I missed the good
| times, but if I tried to recreate today the same things like
| I did in the past, I realized that everything changed: Some
| friends stayed friends, but some others simply didn't. And
| some interests didn't interest me anymore.
|
| I think it runs both a bit deeper and broader than just "what
| I liked then, I don't like now".
|
| In the 2000s and prior, the promise of everything involved
| seemed infinite. We looked at some small or bad website and
| saw the potential for it to become bigger and better. If it
| can do x, maybe it can do y, z, and more.
|
| Today, we know what the full potential of a website is, and
| it's not nearly what we thought it was. So when we see a
| small or bad website now, we know that all it can do is maybe
| be a little better, but trying to improve it could just as
| likely make it unwieldy and worse.
|
| In our disillusionment, we try to recapture that awe-
| inspiring feeling of infinite potential, but instead of
| making something new that's full of potential we only
| pantomime what we were doing 20-30 years ago, by forcing
| arbitrary virtual restraints on ourselves inspired by what
| were once the limits of our reality. Gemini, Hypercard,
| virtual game consoles, etc.
|
| At best the result feels as artificial and empty as a more
| emotionally detached examination of the motivation might've
| suggested, and upon recognizing that we move on from it. At
| worst, we recognize how much of that potential wasn't ever
| realized -- and the often arbitrary and cynical reasons why
| -- and feel even sadder, because our memory of that infinite
| potential is tainted by the reality.
|
| It's like the moonshots of the 60s and 70s leading to people
| thinking we'd be colonizing the solar system or breaking the
| speed of light by now.
|
| Just like any limitation, all of these virtual-limitation
| experiments have some legitimate uses and can inspire
| creativity. But it's become clear that the people who dove
| into it for the doomed nostalgic hope of recapturing that
| feeling of potential have recognized that and moved on,
| either to newer pastures of actual limitation-breaking
| potential or other nostalgic boondoggles.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Yup, nostalgia projects often don't work because people
| don't really want the _exact_ same thing as before, they
| want something which realises the potential of what there
| was before.
|
| Good example is the game Minecraft - when it was new,
| everyone liked it for the sandbox nature and the endless
| possibilities. Now that most of the creative things in the
| game are either dead or stagnant, and the developers are
| actively working against the game's potential, now it feels
| like a dead end. It's similar to the web in this regard.
|
| Nostalgia projects should just _start_ from the old
| principles and build something which is an improvement over
| the things we had back then _and_ which we have now.
| indigochill wrote:
| > Today, we know what the full potential of a website is,
| and it's not nearly what we thought it was.
|
| I mean, people attribute Arab Spring to Twitter (maybe it's
| even when traditional news outlets started paying attention
| to social media? I don't remember, exactly), so I'd say the
| potential of a website is pretty significant, although it
| really has nothing to do with it being a website. More
| about being a place for people to communicate.
|
| I still have basically the same rose-colored glasses for
| the web. Sure, websites are not as exciting as they once
| seemed, but not much about the web's potential for people
| to connect has changed, aside from increased awareness by
| parties who would stand in the way, but in response ways of
| avoiding their attention have also arisen.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Quoting one of my favorite HN comments that captures this
| sentiment really well [1]:
|
| _> I think it 's easy to forget we're not the same people we
| were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about
| various things in the world changing and becoming less
| magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue
| about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and
| dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read
| random opinions about any subject and get into an
| exhilarating flamewar about it._
|
| _> I don 't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s
| and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced
| was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new
| friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite
| horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could
| belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my
| career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry
| the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about
| Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and
| kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of
| them at this point._
|
| _> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet
| and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I
| 'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part
| of the rush anyway._
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27493309
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| That quotation is funny, because the forums I know where
| people argue about bands (or classical or jazz composers or
| performers) are largely kept active by users who are
| already in their late 30s or 40s and up. Passionately
| arguing about band minutiae requires typing longform text,
| but younger generations are mainly using their phones where
| they don't write much longform text, or even don't visit
| third-party forum websites at all.
| specialist wrote:
| Kids these days, amirite?!
|
| I still feel weird about video. Gen Z just confuses me.
|
| Gen Alpha will embrace telepresence. Then Gen Beta will
| reject the esthetics of disintermediation altogether and
| only relate face-to-face. Then Gen Gamma will create
| kinetic visual vocabularies, a synthesis of dance, sign
| language, and improv.
|
| The pendulum will continue to swing.
|
| Each cohort has their own thing. Different medias aren't
| better or worse. They're just different.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| For the record, my post above made no value judgment
| about which medias are better or worse or ragged on "kids
| these days". I just wanted to emphasize that the forum
| behavior which the quoted person claims to have aged out
| of, is actually being kept alive by his very generation.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Younger generations are more engaged in Twitch streams,
| talking to each other while a central person, doing as
| "presentator", streams video.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Younger generations are consuming product from a
| millionaire, and communicating back to them with hearts
| and cash, as a chat runs along the bottom of the screen.
| gerikson wrote:
| Amfora is the best console gemini client I've used. Recommended.
| anthk wrote:
| Bombadillo it's better, it has basic HTTP/S support thru Lynx
| and it can... search inside the pages.
| gerikson wrote:
| I have used both, just compared them to remind myself of
| them. Amfora reflows text so it's actually readable,
| bombadillo doesn't.
| anthk wrote:
| Bombadillo has settings to limit the width.
| donio wrote:
| For Emacs users elpher.el is a good option. There are also some
| additional packages to help with authoring .gmi files either
| locally or over Titan.
|
| https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/
|
| https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el
|
| https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-write/tree/README.md
|
| You can find these in MELPA too.
| vtee44 wrote:
| Gemini was doomed from the start. It barely extended the
| functionality of Gopher, it was basically just Gopher + Markdown,
| and it wasn't even the full .md. I'm pretty sure it was
| impossible to really make a good index of pages because of how
| limited it is. I think even Gopher has some search engines.
|
| It was probably even intentionally limited to be just protocol
| for making a blog without any user input. No possibility of
| making something useful on it. It needed just the forms support,
| but AFAIK the developers didn't want that.
|
| Basic HTML/CSS (without JS) would be minimal enough and even more
| accessible. See img's alt attribute. You can view it on lynx or
| Netsurf, there's no need to use huge clients for that. And even
| better, it was the way already.
|
| I don't get why would someone make a new protocol except for
| filtering people out. Why won't they just focus on making minimal
| web services? As long as there will be something that's not just
| software related, like it is often with Gopher/Gemini.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > I don't get why would someone make a new protocol except for
| filtering people out.
|
| That actually appears to be one of the motivations. Which irks
| me out.
| john-doe wrote:
| I expected Gemtext not allowing emphasis as the true dealbreaker.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I do like Gemini but still question whether the development of a
| protocol was necessary. Couldn't you replace it with webrings and
| a crawler to index them?
| masukomi wrote:
| no. because one of the key aspects of it is that every client
| can interpret the content in whatever way the user prefers.
| Also the restrictions.
|
| Gemini is _incredible_ for accessibility, because there's no
| disconnect between what's displayed and what a blind person can
| consume, and it's not complicated by layout things or
| developers who failed to account for the fact that maybe you
| need huge fonts.
|
| Also, the moment you use normal HTML someone is going to stick
| an image in it. Now, i 100% support this idea. I've never
| embraced Gemini because the idea that the web is better with NO
| images is just absurd to me. I don't care how good of a writer,
| no textual description of something you've seen will come close
| to conveying what a photo can, and if you're trying to describe
| abstract art you're doomed to failure.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| > Gemini is _incredible_ for accessibility
|
| It depends on how you use it. If you want to make ASCII
| tables, then a screen reader will not have an idea of how to
| navigate the table. However a simple HTML <table> is well
| understood by screen-readers. I would contend that properly
| structured HTML documents are far better for accessibility.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Tables are not part of Gemini markup. What it offers is
| accessible. What it does not offer is really beside the
| point.
| smlavine wrote:
| I disagree. What it doesn't offer, people will try to do
| anyway, each in their own ad-hoc way. See how people used
| to abuse <div> before HTML5 (and still do)
| troupo wrote:
| What it doesn't offer makes a significant chunk of
| content that people actually write and read inaccessible.
|
| For example, the lack of simple text styling makes Gemini
| significantly _less_ accessible than it could 've been.
| Because now a screenreader will say something like
| "Significantly asterisk less asterisk accessible" instead
| of "Significantly emphasis less accessible".
|
| I don't think images can have alt-text in Gemini so that
| blind users could get info from there.
|
| Etc.
|
| _Edit_ : someone else has a much better answer:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052729
| mattlondon wrote:
| > Gemini is _incredible_ for accessibility
|
| Incorrect. It is actually _bad_ for accessibility.
|
| Because gemtext was so deliberately hobbled in functionality,
| it is actively hostile to users with accessibility needs.
|
| No tables means people have to do things with ASCII art which
| makes them incomprehensible to screen readers.
|
| Standalone images (i.e. not online with the content) means
| you cannot provide any textual clues or context to what the
| image is about - you just get the image on its own. And the
| pervasive use of ASCII art "images" obviously is terrible.
|
| No way to specify descriptive labels for links.
|
| No way to visually-hide content so that it is only visible to
| screen readers.
|
| No way to use aria-style tags to semantically mark up the
| different sections of a page (this is the navigation are,
| this is the gemlog listing etc)
|
| A bit web-centric but I think important considering the ASCII
| table issue, no way to use JavaScript to provide what is
| known as "managed focus" handlers to allow navigation of
| cells/content areas using cursors+space+enter etc.
|
| I can't remember, but I don't know if it even has in-page
| anchors?
|
| They should have made gemtext slightly more sophisticated -
| inline images, proper tables, and basic visual styling would
| solve a _lot_ of the a11y issues.
|
| It is a shame. I got into Gemini a bit a while ago (even
| wrote a basic library for deno @
| https://github.com/matt1/deno-gemini (essentially a fork of
| my own https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher) and started work
| on a GUI client). I started to experiment with a totally-non-
| spec "style" spec that my client would support - essentially
| a line-by-line thing similar to CSS to apply the most basic
| of styles (colour, font weight, size etc) to gemtext lines,
| and which would be loaded from a well-known file (similar to
| robots.txt etc - compatible clients would load styles.gem or
| whatever).
|
| But ultimately I was scared off by the short-comings of
| gemtext, and the staunch refusal to consider any changes or
| improvements. Which is fine, it is their spec and they don't
| have to change anything, but its why I left.
| anthk wrote:
| Gemini has images, just get an image viewer for a terminal
| Gemini client, or a graphical Gemini client which displays
| images inline, and there are several to choose. Lagrange it's
| pretty good.
| giantrobot wrote:
| If only I had an application that shipped with my system
| that did that already. One can dream I guess.
| eterps wrote:
| I appreciate visual artifacts that convey meaningful
| information, such as actual photographs, graphs, diagrams,
| and similar elements.
|
| Which is probably a relatively small subset of images on the
| web.
| specialist wrote:
| > _Gemini is _incredible_ for accessibility_
|
| An all new protocol stack focused on accessibility could be
| pretty cool. Flip the problem. Instead of layering
| accessibility on top, make it the foundation.
|
| We might learn that an accessibility-focus stack proves
| better for all use cases. Kinda like accessible consumer
| goods are also better for every one.
|
| Something fun to think about.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > no textual description of something you've seen will come
| close to conveying what a photo can
|
| For strictly descriptive writing, maybe. But novels remain
| popular even in 2023 and while they mostly do not have
| illustrations of any kind, good ones paint some very vivid
| pictures.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Gemini is incredible for accessibility because there is
| nothing of value on it so blind people aren't missing out in
| any way. Based on my attempts to use gemini I'm not even
| really being sarcastic.
|
| The idea that accessibility means everyone's experience is
| nerfed into the ground just seems fundamentally wrong. We
| need to do much better than that and enable a richer
| experience that still is accessible. There's really no reason
| that can't be the case.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > I've never embraced Gemini because the idea that the web is
| better with NO images is just absurd to me. I don't care how
| good of a writer, no textual description of something you've
| seen will come close to conveying what a photo can, and if
| you're trying to describe abstract art you're doomed to
| failure.
|
| Gemini does not prevent anyone to put images. What it doesn't
| provide is the semantic separation between a link to an image
| and embedding that image into the page. The choice is up to
| the reader. Actually the default setting of the lagrange
| gemini browser is to download and show the images by default.
| tjalfi wrote:
| Some of the Gemini goals such as ease of implementation, no
| user tracking or extensions, and a short specification (16
| pages) are much easier with a new protocol.
| maxwell wrote:
| Or create a subset of HTTP/HTML, maybe more like HTTP 0.9.
|
| https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Also, it's trivial to create HTML subsets or custom
| vocabularies using SGML including Markdown syntax conversion
| - after all, that's what SGML was designed for.
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