undefined | Better HN

0 pointsvertex-four5y ago0 comments

The problem is that then you link to https://yourfriendsblog.org, and a couple years down the line your friend decides this safe subset is too restricting for them and decides to replace their blog with Wordpress with all the plugins and Cloudflare captchas and Google Analytics and evercookies and whatever else. The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.

When you link to a Gemini URL, you're linking to something you know can't be replaced with something privacy-violating in the future. The worst that can happen is the server shuts down, which is a very different failure mode. And someone is less likely to do that than to switch to a different brand of HTML - or so's the hope.

It's not going to be a major thing that everyone uses. That's ok! Neither is IRC, mailing lists, and whatever else - but people still use them, every day. There's ideas exchanged, friendships made, relationships formed, and they serve a not-insignificant community's needs.

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

oscargrouch5y ago· 1 in thread

> The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.

Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.

If you guys manage to have some 'killer apps' on this protocol, where people will try to reach it no matter how its is implemented, than there's a chance.

IRC killer app is IRC itself, and they manage to push themselves as alternative in the nineties where a lot of popular protocols and alternatives like the web were still in the beginning.

Anyway, if you convince people over time to serve their content through this medium, with enough and interesting content, the user will try/learn to reach them.

But i dont know, i think at least they should be trying to use some p2p DNS system, making it easy for people to serve their own content, or revisit BBS and serve contents in tree-like structures akin to directories..

I feel that there must be something to really differentiate it from everything else. Some things that are unique, and that the web + others are not covering. Because if you think about IRC or Email, they have distinct features that web could never cover even being a mammoth protocol, while this doesnt hold the same way when you think of Gemini proposal.

Anyway, people trying to do something, to change things for what they perceive as the better is a good thing, and it should always be celebrated, because even when the thing doesn't stick it might need adjustments, incremental evolution or just to serve as a influence to something else or through experience inspire the creators to create something even better.

vertex-fourOP5y ago

> Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.

Who, exactly, without a profit motive, wants the majority of users? I don't want to talk to most people, and I don't want most people to read what I have to say. I, like most people I think, want to spend most of my time in my community sharing things I find interesting with people in my community.

It's the same as tilde servers, or MUDs. They're not going to take over the world. They're small communities and most people will never even know they exist, and that's fine.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse