7 ms·

Bye, Gemini

223 points by saclark11 3y ago

john-doe 3y ago
I expected Gemtext not allowing emphasis as the true dealbreaker.
translucyd 3y ago
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 3y ago
  >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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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.
    - indigochill 3y ago
      > 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.
gerikson 3y ago
Amfora is the best console gemini client I've used. Recommended.
- donio 3y ago
  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://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/ https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-write/tree/README.md https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-write/tree/README.md You can find these in MELPA too.
- anthk 3y ago
  Bombadillo it's better, it has basic HTTP/S support thru Lynx and it can... search inside the pages.
  - gerikson 3y ago
    I have used both, just compared them to remind myself of them. Amfora reflows text so it's actually readable, bombadillo doesn't.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Bombadillo has settings to limit the width.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
eterps 3y ago
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 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throw10920 3y ago
  > 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.
snvzz 3y ago
Gemini might go away, but Gopher is forever.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Bah, gopher is just a lousy hytelnet wannabe.
- eddieroger 3y ago
  I don't know, Gopher being removed from Firefox and Chrome over the last few years kinda disagrees with that sentiment.
  - distcs 3y ago
    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.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    FTP was even removed 2 years ago. Really, look that up.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        I only use X, YouTube, Insta, and TikTok. Browsers should just refuse to connect to any other site besides those
tjpnz 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - eterps 3y ago
    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.
  - sudobash1 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
      Tables are not part of Gemini markup. What it offers is accessible. What it does not offer is really beside the point.
qwerty456127 3y ago
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?
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  Readers don't need a heavy web browser at all. Even for a minimal html, everyone uses a different "minimal" subset.
- asoneth 3y ago
  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.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu tries to be this, and is now being worked on full time by its creator.
    - seanw444 3y ago
      Also https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
  - eterps 3y ago
    > search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites I actually like that idea.
airstrike 3y ago
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 3y ago
  (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 3y ago
  > 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
woodrowbarlow 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Or it could use PostScript for ... everything.
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      At that point, you have a digital fax machine that prints out a message when you you dial it. Which beckons the question: does anyone know of or remember an automated system like this, where you rang a number and it would ring your fax machine back with a document? I like to imagine I could have made my millions on 'dial-a-newspaper' back in the 90s!
      - The_Colonel 3y ago
        > At that point, you have a digital fax machine that prints out a message when you you dial it. Isn't that mostly what we want from internet?
      - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
        > [D]oes anyone know of or remember an automated system like this, where you rang a number and it would ring your fax machine back with a document? I like to imagine I could have made my millions on 'dial-a-newspaper' back in the 90s! There were many, though they were not seemingly used for newspapers. Generally, you subscribed to a newsletter, or were subscribed against your will to a mostly-ads-but-pretending-to-be-a-newsletter. These would arrive on your fax machine, usually on a schedule. Or you dialed another fax machine that would respond with some infopage, specs sheet, or government document (and sometimes let you choose from a published menu by entering other codes after connecting). I was only ever on the receiving end, so don't remember the names of any of these systems. I believe the dial-a-menu faxes mainly existed on high-end machines owned by large corporations.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
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/
- floren 3y ago
  > 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.
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    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?
em-bee 3y ago
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
ufmace 3y ago
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 3y ago
  See the "titan" protocol. https://transjovian.org/titan/page/The%20Titan%20Specification 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 3y ago
    That's actually pretty nice!
  - ufmace 3y ago
    That site appears to be completely down, can't even find much of anything under archive.org.
  - ufmace 3y ago
    Huh never mind before it actually works fine at home, must have been a pesky work network filter against it for some reason. I've never seen our work filters do that before though.
poopbutt7 3y ago
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.
vtee44 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  > I don't get why someone would make a new protocol except for filtering people out. That could have been there intentions, I have idea, but if you think the web shouldn't have support for cookies or javascript, for example, then you really a new protocol. Even if you build a minimal web service, it still lives in a sandbox of third party cookiesand scripts, browser plugins, etc
Knee_Pain 3y ago
Quite literally: the real Gemini was the friends we made all along
ubertaco 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - occoder 3y ago
    I don't know much about Gemini beyond a cursory look, but I don't think inline media is impossible. IIUC it is up to the Gemini client to decide if it displays media inline. My understanding is that Gemini clients don't display inline media in order to defeat privacy-compromising techniques such as tracking pixels. A Gemini client could very reasonably decide to show images inline if they are larger than 16x16 for instance.
ilaksh 3y ago
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://freenet.org/ https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet (an idea, not implemented)
bennylava 3y ago
[dead]
textprotocol 3y ago
µprotocols are fun. try text://protocol for that truly minimalistic avant-garde experience. [01] [01] https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main
woah 3y ago
what was this, just MySpace for 30-something software developers?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  It's still around, but I think you got the gist.
seanhunter 3y ago
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.
gatane 3y ago
There is always a song: https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8 https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8
Endy 3y ago
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.
- jamilton 3y ago
  There's gemlog.blue if you want to have a simple blog without hosting it yourself. kennedy.gemi.dev and geminispace.info are both good search engines, though maybe not "really great".
nologic01 3y ago
> Gemini is a reaction to bloated modern websites Correction: it is an overreaction 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.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Yes, I would like to see something between the web and Gemini where the style is always provided by the browser, like reader mode, and there is no javascipt, but there is a fairly rich set of media like images, video, and sounds. You really need to easily "interact" with content by replying to posts, chatting, and up-voting, searching, and navigating.
rglullis 3y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802376
- jamilton 3y ago
  Someone losing interest in Gemini isn't really evidence that's true.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    But the people using Gemini are still using flawed reasoning and there is still nothing in the protocol that can not be done with HTTP.
    - jamilton 3y ago
      The same arguments from that linked comment still apply and make sense to me but don't seem to hold water for you, so I won't rehash them.
    - flagrant_taco 3y ago
      > and there is still nothing in the protocol that can not be done with HTTP. This argument itself is using flawed reasoning. Gemini was purposely designed as a subset of HTTP rather than a superset, starting with a tough approximation of HTTP 0.9. Of course everything that is supported in Gemini can also be implemented in HTTP.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        [dead]
devonnull 3y ago
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!
ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  TLS runs fine on 100-ish MHz systems. That is less powerful than most modern embedded devices and covers vintage deep into the 90s.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  I actually consider TLS an anti-feature in the case of Gemini. What I mean is: what use do you have of TLS that is not about commercial applications and gatekeeping? The obvious use of TLS is for e-commerce, so that you can pay securely. And for your passwords when you log into an account. But Gemini is not designed for e-commerce, it is designed for reading text documents. And it doesn't look like the philosophy is to restrict access to documents, so no need for accounts and passwords. What do you have to hide on Gemini? Ok, imagine you have something to hide on Gemini. Here TLS offers only limited protection: it won't help you if the server is compromised, and it doesn't hide your connection to the server, only the data. For that, there are other privacy-oriented protocols that are much better suited for that. So, TLS is a great protocol for the commercial web, and a rather weak one for privacy. Why do you think Google pushes so hard for https? And for the anti-tampering part that is worthwhile, I think it would be better done at the document level, for example with PGP-style signature blocks.
0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago
Dearth of content and politics aside, it is really nice on mobile.
Daegalus 3y ago
I think Gemini just went too far with how much they got rid of. I think the ideal middle is using a stripped down HTTP subset, with HTML5 (maybe with some things removed, like script tags), and the latest CSS. No JS. Focus on the document. Make any changes needed to improve things. No crossdomain cookies. Maybe no cookies at all. Only GET and POST maybe. Only allow some very specific headers maybe and strip anything else. Figure out a more novel system for secure transmission, maybe by default. I'm thinking of starting something with Servo, I know it's not HTML5 yes but it could be a good way to limit things. Or maybe Libweb from the Ladybird project.
slackfan 3y ago
Gemini also doesn't really offer anything significantly better over gopher, imho, and only adds things that make it, ironically, less useable.
syntheweave 3y ago
I am doing something using Gemtext, but not the Gemini protocol. Basically - it's a decent way to "start over" and not be HTML-compatible, which is important if you are moving away from the owned-server model of hosting(which I am). It recognizes that it's not Markdown. The inline limitation is something I am probably going to breach at some point. Gemini itself is something I admire, but like Gopher, it offers few frontiers for exploration.
TsonnReopev 3y ago
[dead]
slmjkdbtl 3y ago
WWW is a superset of all these small fun protocols, none of them offer anything the web isn't capable of, but they are great examples of sometimes what's fun is the limitations, not the features.
jug 3y ago
Most importantly for me is that nothing on HTTP protocol stops you from designing basic websites. A protocol is about the transport, not the content. This is the main fallacy about Gemini to me. So, nothing requires you to first jump onto an obscure protocol in order to present websites that support text mode web browsers and minimalist reading experiences. HTML is great for this. It has a decade long history and text browsers are actively supported. Then there is the protocol simplicity argument. HTTP is not a very complex protocol with great overhead as-is. Rendering pages is not a HTTP hurdle or even a HTML hurdle but a CSS and JavaScript hurdle. That’s where the complexity arises and you walling yourself off basic renderers begin. But doing so is a choice, not anything coming from HTTP or HTML. In fact, the situation has gotten _better_ over time with HTML 5 with improved semantic elements and deprecating styling elements. This makes it easier than before to understand and present a website in various forms. Or it should do so. Now there is the topic of obnoxious websites burdened with JavaScript and heavy, complex CSS but since this argument is about people willing to use Gemini, they are not the kind of demography that would design obnoxious websites, but clean and well-behaved ones according to the spec. So using HTTP and HTML is thus not a problem for Gemini minded people. Or it shouldn’t be. I think Gemini is mostly a psychological phenomenon. People were willing to do something for themselves that captures their ideology and intentionally walls them off because they wanted to more clearly feel part of a subculture. This is harder to achieve if you just subscribe to a minimalist, well-behaved blog service like Bear or Blot.im. The one thing I’d love to have today is native Markdown support in web browsers that could have a custom style sheet applied to them. You’d enforce simplicity in a similar way as Gopher or Gemini but in the normal web = way more convenient and lowering barriers.
tpoacher 3y ago
There's a certain sense of irony in the fact that the same people who don't see the point of gemini "when HTTP exists" and "when there's nothing stopping you from writing a simple no-frills html page" also seem to be the same people who love 50 shades of markdown and bend over backwards to support it, yet would never dream of writing the equivalent in html unless it was as part of a framework.

223 points by saclark11 3y ago

I expected Gemtext not allowing emphasis as the true dealbreaker.

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 3y ago
>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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.
  - indigochill 3y ago
    > 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.

gerikson 3y ago

Amfora is the best console gemini client I've used. Recommended.

donio 3y ago
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://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/ https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-write/tree/README.md https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/gemini-write/tree/README.md You can find these in MELPA too.
anthk 3y ago
Bombadillo it's better, it has basic HTTP/S support thru Lynx and it can... search inside the pages.
- gerikson 3y ago
  I have used both, just compared them to remind myself of them. Amfora reflows text so it's actually readable, bombadillo doesn't.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Bombadillo has settings to limit the width.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

eterps 3y ago

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 3y ago
[deleted]
throw10920 3y ago
> 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.

snvzz 3y ago

Gemini might go away, but Gopher is forever.

NikkiA 3y ago
Bah, gopher is just a lousy hytelnet wannabe.
eddieroger 3y ago
I don't know, Gopher being removed from Firefox and Chrome over the last few years kinda disagrees with that sentiment.
- distcs 3y ago
  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.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  FTP was even removed 2 years ago. Really, look that up.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      I only use X, YouTube, Insta, and TikTok. Browsers should just refuse to connect to any other site besides those

tjpnz 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- eterps 3y ago
  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.
- sudobash1 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    Tables are not part of Gemini markup. What it offers is accessible. What it does not offer is really beside the point.

qwerty456127 3y ago

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?

kubanczyk 3y ago
Readers don't need a heavy web browser at all. Even for a minimal html, everyone uses a different "minimal" subset.
asoneth 3y ago
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.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu tries to be this, and is now being worked on full time by its creator.
  - seanw444 3y ago
    Also https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- eterps 3y ago
  > search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites I actually like that idea.

airstrike 3y ago

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 3y ago
(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 3y ago
> 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

woodrowbarlow 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Or it could use PostScript for ... everything.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    At that point, you have a digital fax machine that prints out a message when you you dial it. Which beckons the question: does anyone know of or remember an automated system like this, where you rang a number and it would ring your fax machine back with a document? I like to imagine I could have made my millions on 'dial-a-newspaper' back in the 90s!
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      > At that point, you have a digital fax machine that prints out a message when you you dial it. Isn't that mostly what we want from internet?
    - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
      > [D]oes anyone know of or remember an automated system like this, where you rang a number and it would ring your fax machine back with a document? I like to imagine I could have made my millions on 'dial-a-newspaper' back in the 90s! There were many, though they were not seemingly used for newspapers. Generally, you subscribed to a newsletter, or were subscribed against your will to a mostly-ads-but-pretending-to-be-a-newsletter. These would arrive on your fax machine, usually on a schedule. Or you dialed another fax machine that would respond with some infopage, specs sheet, or government document (and sometimes let you choose from a published menu by entering other codes after connecting). I was only ever on the receiving end, so don't remember the names of any of these systems. I believe the dial-a-menu faxes mainly existed on high-end machines owned by large corporations.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

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/

floren 3y ago
> 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.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  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?

em-bee 3y ago

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

ufmace 3y ago

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 3y ago
See the "titan" protocol. https://transjovian.org/titan/page/The%20Titan%20Specification 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 3y ago
  That's actually pretty nice!
- ufmace 3y ago
  That site appears to be completely down, can't even find much of anything under archive.org.
- ufmace 3y ago
  Huh never mind before it actually works fine at home, must have been a pesky work network filter against it for some reason. I've never seen our work filters do that before though.

poopbutt7 3y ago

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.

vtee44 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
flagrant_taco 3y ago
> I don't get why someone would make a new protocol except for filtering people out. That could have been there intentions, I have idea, but if you think the web shouldn't have support for cookies or javascript, for example, then you really a new protocol. Even if you build a minimal web service, it still lives in a sandbox of third party cookiesand scripts, browser plugins, etc

Knee_Pain 3y ago

Quite literally: the real Gemini was the friends we made all along

ubertaco 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- occoder 3y ago
  I don't know much about Gemini beyond a cursory look, but I don't think inline media is impossible. IIUC it is up to the Gemini client to decide if it displays media inline. My understanding is that Gemini clients don't display inline media in order to defeat privacy-compromising techniques such as tracking pixels. A Gemini client could very reasonably decide to show images inline if they are larger than 16x16 for instance.

ilaksh 3y ago

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://freenet.org/ https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet (an idea, not implemented)

bennylava 3y ago

[dead]

textprotocol 3y ago

µprotocols are fun. try text://protocol for that truly minimalistic avant-garde experience. [01] [01] https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main

woah 3y ago

what was this, just MySpace for 30-something software developers?

pessimizer 3y ago
It's still around, but I think you got the gist.

seanhunter 3y ago

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.

gatane 3y ago

There is always a song: https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8 https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8

Endy 3y ago

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.

jamilton 3y ago
There's gemlog.blue if you want to have a simple blog without hosting it yourself. kennedy.gemi.dev and geminispace.info are both good search engines, though maybe not "really great".

nologic01 3y ago

> Gemini is a reaction to bloated modern websites Correction: it is an overreaction 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.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Yes, I would like to see something between the web and Gemini where the style is always provided by the browser, like reader mode, and there is no javascipt, but there is a fairly rich set of media like images, video, and sounds. You really need to easily "interact" with content by replying to posts, chatting, and up-voting, searching, and navigating.

rglullis 3y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802376

jamilton 3y ago
Someone losing interest in Gemini isn't really evidence that's true.
- rglullis 3y ago
  But the people using Gemini are still using flawed reasoning and there is still nothing in the protocol that can not be done with HTTP.
  - jamilton 3y ago
    The same arguments from that linked comment still apply and make sense to me but don't seem to hold water for you, so I won't rehash them.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    > and there is still nothing in the protocol that can not be done with HTTP. This argument itself is using flawed reasoning. Gemini was purposely designed as a subset of HTTP rather than a superset, starting with a tough approximation of HTTP 0.9. Of course everything that is supported in Gemini can also be implemented in HTTP.
    - rglullis 3y ago
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devonnull 3y ago

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!

ThrowAway1922A 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
TLS runs fine on 100-ish MHz systems. That is less powerful than most modern embedded devices and covers vintage deep into the 90s.
GuB-42 3y ago
I actually consider TLS an anti-feature in the case of Gemini. What I mean is: what use do you have of TLS that is not about commercial applications and gatekeeping? The obvious use of TLS is for e-commerce, so that you can pay securely. And for your passwords when you log into an account. But Gemini is not designed for e-commerce, it is designed for reading text documents. And it doesn't look like the philosophy is to restrict access to documents, so no need for accounts and passwords. What do you have to hide on Gemini? Ok, imagine you have something to hide on Gemini. Here TLS offers only limited protection: it won't help you if the server is compromised, and it doesn't hide your connection to the server, only the data. For that, there are other privacy-oriented protocols that are much better suited for that. So, TLS is a great protocol for the commercial web, and a rather weak one for privacy. Why do you think Google pushes so hard for https? And for the anti-tampering part that is worthwhile, I think it would be better done at the document level, for example with PGP-style signature blocks.

0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago

Dearth of content and politics aside, it is really nice on mobile.

Daegalus 3y ago

I think Gemini just went too far with how much they got rid of. I think the ideal middle is using a stripped down HTTP subset, with HTML5 (maybe with some things removed, like script tags), and the latest CSS. No JS. Focus on the document. Make any changes needed to improve things. No crossdomain cookies. Maybe no cookies at all. Only GET and POST maybe. Only allow some very specific headers maybe and strip anything else. Figure out a more novel system for secure transmission, maybe by default. I'm thinking of starting something with Servo, I know it's not HTML5 yes but it could be a good way to limit things. Or maybe Libweb from the Ladybird project.

slackfan 3y ago

Gemini also doesn't really offer anything significantly better over gopher, imho, and only adds things that make it, ironically, less useable.

syntheweave 3y ago

I am doing something using Gemtext, but not the Gemini protocol. Basically - it's a decent way to "start over" and not be HTML-compatible, which is important if you are moving away from the owned-server model of hosting(which I am). It recognizes that it's not Markdown. The inline limitation is something I am probably going to breach at some point. Gemini itself is something I admire, but like Gopher, it offers few frontiers for exploration.

TsonnReopev 3y ago

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slmjkdbtl 3y ago

WWW is a superset of all these small fun protocols, none of them offer anything the web isn't capable of, but they are great examples of sometimes what's fun is the limitations, not the features.

jug 3y ago

Most importantly for me is that nothing on HTTP protocol stops you from designing basic websites. A protocol is about the transport, not the content. This is the main fallacy about Gemini to me. So, nothing requires you to first jump onto an obscure protocol in order to present websites that support text mode web browsers and minimalist reading experiences. HTML is great for this. It has a decade long history and text browsers are actively supported. Then there is the protocol simplicity argument. HTTP is not a very complex protocol with great overhead as-is. Rendering pages is not a HTTP hurdle or even a HTML hurdle but a CSS and JavaScript hurdle. That’s where the complexity arises and you walling yourself off basic renderers begin. But doing so is a choice, not anything coming from HTTP or HTML. In fact, the situation has gotten _better_ over time with HTML 5 with improved semantic elements and deprecating styling elements. This makes it easier than before to understand and present a website in various forms. Or it should do so. Now there is the topic of obnoxious websites burdened with JavaScript and heavy, complex CSS but since this argument is about people willing to use Gemini, they are not the kind of demography that would design obnoxious websites, but clean and well-behaved ones according to the spec. So using HTTP and HTML is thus not a problem for Gemini minded people. Or it shouldn’t be. I think Gemini is mostly a psychological phenomenon. People were willing to do something for themselves that captures their ideology and intentionally walls them off because they wanted to more clearly feel part of a subculture. This is harder to achieve if you just subscribe to a minimalist, well-behaved blog service like Bear or Blot.im. The one thing I’d love to have today is native Markdown support in web browsers that could have a custom style sheet applied to them. You’d enforce simplicity in a similar way as Gopher or Gemini but in the normal web = way more convenient and lowering barriers.

tpoacher 3y ago

There's a certain sense of irony in the fact that the same people who don't see the point of gemini "when HTTP exists" and "when there's nothing stopping you from writing a simple no-frills html page" also seem to be the same people who love 50 shades of markdown and bend over backwards to support it, yet would never dream of writing the equivalent in html unless it was as part of a framework.