With surveillance capitalism reaching it’s peak in 2026/2027, is getting out the Web the only way for the privacy inclined user?
Will Gemini (or cousins) go the way of Linux? Or is it foverer condemned to go the way of Hurd
While gemini is a great project, I personally think a better route would be to create a local or server service that converts and saves existing webpages to markdown, and local apps acting as markdown browsers utilizing it.
With that people could write simple browsers, as well as reduce spying and have static content viewable on all form factors.
Everything that’s not static content (like the fediverse) already can have dedicated apps.
Gemini is probably going to go the way of the Hurd sadly, IMO. It is a niche that only privacy enthusiasts and FOSS enthusiasts wish to succeed. The Hurd is doing pretty good for how little people are working on it. If anyone is interested checkout my community, which is centered around the GNU Hurd.
What do you mean? Gemini isn’t open source, that’s Gemma right?
Oh sorry, checked the article, looks like someone named an internet protocol Gemini too
Yeah it sucks that google coined the name after their ai chatbot. The first thing that comes to everyone when they hear the name gemini is that bot.
I recall learning about it around the time i started to learn Linux, when the pandamic first appeared. The introductory text/blog, or whatever it was, really resonated with me. I recall I kept reading and growing more and more excited and thinking I finally found a place on the internet that had people who thought like me, who hated the ad-choked, bot-death, politically-emotional wasteland and reality show the internet became.
I installed a client or three and …nothing. I couldn’t find anything. I didn’t know what to look for, I’m not sure there even was a search or a way to know what content there was, beyond curated lists of page titles.
I tried learning how to make my own page and must have gotten confused or distracted and moved on.
I go back and try again every year or so but I think I lack something that helps me get into it more.
Maybe I need another user to befriend, a twin so to speak, hence the name of the protocol. Maybe I need a better internet connection (I’m poor, speed tops out at ~300kb/s, average is ~100kb/s). Maybe I just need another year or two.
I loved their note:
Note: This article is about Gemini, the HTTP-like Internet protocol for document browsing, and not the large language model or the cryptocurrency of the same name. Nor it is about astrology.
The idea sounds interesting. I’m not against trying new things, but it seems kinda dead in the water?
For me forums were big part of my Internet history - but it is history. I’m not sure many people would choose to go back…This is not about nostalgia but to fight against surveillance weaponization and commoditification of what was once a tool for knowledge sharing. The old internet of bulletin boards and irc was essentially human, this thing we have now is something else. Did you chuckle at that chunck of text and not get where the author (as many of us) was standing from?
It feels like the good old Ivory Tower. “The let’s lock ourselves in!” mentality never worked in changing the world for a beter place.
I’m not saying having principles and standing against slop/spyware/privacy nightmare is bad. But it feels a bit off to me.
I wish the best, and I want the best for the future.“Lock ourselves in?” We want to overthrow the current state of affairs.
Ok, I’ve found out a liberal on Lemmy.ml. 🤦♂️
I don’t understand the second part of your comment.
If you want to make something better you think insulting others will do it?A ‘new’ protocol that won’t have much chance to be inseminated into the general population just means those projects will separate the idealist groups into smaller groups. Who would probably have more chance working together against the big system.
Hence locking yourself in the tower.Edit: typo
Let me mince this to you in a more palatable bit but with Marxist praxis: working together under the same old status quo is exactly what put all of us in the cage. There won’t be a magical popular new protocol being birthed from the void: it’s precisely the myriad of options that will allow the best one to be battle tested (in politics, we call this the two-line struggle although there are more than two lines in dispute) and gain traction. Idealism is expecting that the same old strategy of putting up with what exists right now for the lack of a sure win strategy will defeat the greed corporations controlling the current Web, the current social complacency, the gerrymandering, the two parties system, the capitalism.
I never said use the same status quo. Gather in bigger groups. You are being conquered by being divided.
My problem is the miniscule groups. Just look at the other comments. No one said: “yes, this is the future!”.
Ivory tower.That’s not really how it works. Greater groups allow some atrocities like the DSA calling themselves socialist and deviate to the status quo. Unity in theory and action is a necessity before greater numbers.
sourcehut hosts it free and makes publishing dead simple. You just push a tarball, and Bob’s your mother’s brother.
