Gemini is a gem
In a recent post highlighted by hacker news マリウス decided gemini was really bad because he had to install a new browser to view it. His argument is that everything gemini does could be handled by pre-existing protocols.
What's the point, he argues, if it doesn't advance technology with blockchain, IPFS, or ZeroNet?
Regarding the limited formatting options:
As for the actual content, it is easily possible to configure a modern HTTP server like nginx to respond with nothing but pure Markdown. Users could then install either of the dozens of extensions available for their web browser, to be able to visit the Markdown-only websites more comfortably.
He refutes gemini's stance of taking privacy seriously by claiming he could write his own gemini server and track everyone who visited.
Finally his solution:
If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website, contribute to projects like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Tor, and stop using websites that do track their users or spam them with ads. If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it or use it in a way in which your site will still function even without it, and stop using websites that won’t even load without JavaScript enabled.
I'm sad to say that ship has sailed. I do all these things and constantly tell people to stay off social networks, use firefox over chrome, linux over windows, and open source over proprietary software but nothing changes. People just don't care and it's too much bother to change.
Sure you could wire nginx to serve markdown and ask people to install a plugin to view your content but this will never happen. Apart from the insurmountable effort required from your users, your site would still be a sheep among wolves.
Gemini's greatest feature is once you're on the network, you don't have to worry about wolves. The overly restrictive one-request one-response protocol and the primitive markup makes it difficult to abuse. Sure Zuckerberg could move facebook to gemini and track people as they interact with a billion different pages on his server but apart from being astronomically unlikely, he couldn't abuse the protocol to do any more. It's too primitive for abuse and this is a good thing. I can relax when I follow a link in gemini because I know it won't have advertisements, tracking, or obnoxious media.
I'm reminded once again of devdocs.io and how they can somehow install persistent documentation to my browser that is viewable offline. This is cool but terrifying. How much other shit is stored on my system without my knowledge? I'm super careful about the sites I visit and I take so many precautions about 10% of the pages I visit won't render in my browser because of my adblocking, dns redirects, disabled javascript, and cookie policies but devdocs.io still works. The modern web is too complex for it's own good.
Mozilla recently decided to get into the ongoing scam that is cryptocurrency and were forced to back down after an outcry. This was just another of a long list of problematic decisions made by the company and I and many others would desperately like to move to something else but there are no better alternatives. The consensus among developers is the requirements to produce a new web browser are too high. Rendering the modern web with support for all the protocols we take for granted, like javascript and media decoding is already a prohibitively high bar - not to mention you would still be forced to follow chrome, a browser written by an advertising company with enough market share they get to steer the protocol.
マリウス's complaint raised the usual discussion including the blog post that triggered this one..
Everyone agrees the web is shit. マリウス wants to fight for change but I think it's already a lost cause. Gemini is a kneejerk reaction to the modern web and is designed to thwart the marketers, trolls, and authoritarians in charge of things today. I think there's an opportunity to invent the next Gemini protocol with a few more features but it will have to be designed with the wisdom of Athena because those fuckers are devious.
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