For those, who do not know what the Gemini protocol is, think of it as a modern, light-weight HTTP alternative without CSS or JavaScript. In layman term, you could see it as Web 1.0 reinvented. It uses GemText instead of HTML. For folks who want to try it out, you can either install a Gemini extension for your HTTPs browser (which kinda defeats the purpose, as modern browsers are heavy), or download a dedicated Gemini browser like Lagrange. Here’s a few sites you can access in Gemini.
Personally, I love it, although I miss a few stuff, like for example, multimedia, streaming and stuff like that. The memory foorprint is very low, and pages are super-fast.
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I understand the sentiment, but… HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to “thing everyone uses” for no good reason.
It may not be particularly useful, but I welcome a challenge to the current status quo. The Internet is a powerful resource, and we’re still building on top of the first protocol that worked back in 1991 to navigate it. Gemini isn’t something I could see having any mainstream appeal, but it’s absolutely worth experimenting with alternatives to the World Wide Web. Having more than one functional open standard could help revolutionize the Internet in novel new ways.
I think you’re thinking backward. Internet is what it is because a single protocole unified it. Without it, you’d have island working with only one browser each, some would eventually die and with them large parts of Internet would disappear.
Internet works on unified protocoles. Everything that challenged this model is bound to fail. That’s why javascript is so successful eventhough it’s so shitty as a language.
Evolution can only be iterative.
I like it. Everyone these days seems to want web pages that are 5MB of dynamically generated junk.
My little website is just static hugo-generated stuff.
Ads are the main reason for all the junk though.
i use firefox with ubo and most websites are really fast this way.
CSS and js are nothing to do with http. In fact neither is html really.
It’s just a protocol for transferring text.
Web 1.0 is beginning to seem like a golden age, isn’t it?
When there were waaay more personal websites than corporate ones 🥲
Hypnospace Outlaw made me realize we missed out on something special.
It’s fine, I use Lagrange to read it sometimes, and there’s a few gemlogs I follow. But it’s in a weird space of “almost HTML, so why not just do HTML?”
Gopher still works fine, and has more clients (I still use Lynx). I like the clean separation of menus (even if you use a lot of
iinfo lines) and documents. There’s a bunch of gopher holes still out here. I haven’t updated mine in a couple years, but when/if I move it over to a new server I will, as kind of a back-channel to the site & blog.It’s a cool idea and I was using it every day for a while. I love the gemtext format and I even made some “gempub” ebooks for fun. I have a site on flounder.online with some crap on it. Two things brought it all down for me.
The first is the hard TLS requirement. I’ve read all the rationales about this and still don’t see the point. I get the principle behind it but it’s not worth requiring that much infrastructure. It sucks all the fun and accessibility out of it. Which is my other issue.
We all know a platform can’t be TOO accessible without becoming like twitter. But if accessibility is too low you’ll end up with nothing but upper class tech workers moaning about the bougie problems that they created for themselves. The only capsules that had anything decent on them had HTTP proxies. It didn’t feel like a platform worth contributing to for someone like me.
I’ve heard about the Spartan protocol which is similar but has no TLS requirement. I’ve been planning on getting into that but all I’ve done is read about it.
I like browsing it! You always find interesting people and writings about a wide variety of topics. It’s got enough users to have variety but not so many that it feels in any way corporate. It’s very much in line with the idea that limitations breed creativity. I’d highly recommend everyone download a decent browser and look around it a bit.
My only worry is that the Google Gemini AI thing will quickly suck all the air out of that name.
I got super into it for a while but there just isn’t enough “killer sites” to keep it interesting.
It really is just a little too minimalist. It’s not really easily possible to do forums etc.
