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0 pointsanigbrowl4y ago0 comments

I like the idea of Gemini but the reality is 'here's a list of random servers which could be anything but at least our user interface is from the 1980s'. I like how it's lighter than the web, but I don't see how it's 'heavier than Gopher' as suggested (and I have been watching the Gemini project for a few months now).

I was on the internet well before the web and I used Gopher all the time. It was great by the standards of the time (ie 1200 baud modems so a page of text like this HN discussion would easily take a minute or more to load and would probably do so with many errors). Gopher was (somewhat) integrated with two other services known as Archie and Veronica for content discovery. It was primitive, but relatively easy to navigate if you knew what you were looking for.

What we have here is a bunch of Gemini servers but no concept of user service. Are they blogs? aggregators? malware endpoints? interactive fiction/text adventures? I don't know, and that's not part of the fun. It's as if Gemini has fetishized the least good aspects of the BBS/Gopher/pre-web experience - lack of UI consistency and non-discoverability - in the hope of getting something better by forcing everyone to start over.

Nobody* has time for that. Harder doesn't automatically equal better. Gemini would be vastly improved if it presented with some color/minimal formatting (like syntax highlighting controlled at the user end or with typography for the color-blind)and seeded some useful information like mirroring Wikipedia or something that people are already familiar with. There are some Wikipedia proxies (gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi?25) but the only working one I know of is not listed (gemini://vault.transjovian.org).

This is Not Great.

* hyperbole is always an option

To change the world, there needs to be some critical mass of people using it, and to get people using it there needs to be some demonstration of what it's capable of. I want to love it. I have clients (plural) installed. But honestly, I don't want to invest the time figuring out how to make the server do interesting stuff, if I can't find anything very interesting to do with the client. Absent any effort to make it functional for one external thing, it's doomed to remain a toy, or an 'esoteric protocol' that everyone pays lip service to but nobody actually uses.

Here's a suggestion: get a gemini HN proxy running. It ought to be super easy given how minimal HN is, and would give people and excuse to have a Gemini browser running all the time.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

zzo38computer4y ago· 1 in thread

These are not problems with the Gemini protocol itself.

The Gemini clients that I have seen do usually allow the user to change the colours, as far as I can tell. (This is usually better than the document specifying the colours, in my opinion.)

Gemini does have a write protocol (I think it is to change "gemini:" at the beginning of the request to "titan:", add some URI parameters for the size and MIME type of the data (I think it might have been better to put those things on the next line (I am not really sure), but well, now it is what it is), and then the data to be written starting on the next line). However, for some kind of things, other protocols would be better.

For interactive fiction/text adventures (or other interactive applications), Telnet/SSH will be better than Gemini, I think. For message forums, NNTP will be better.

Gemini does have the advantage that the file format is easily readable/writable even if only treated as plain text, you do not need a software to interpret it, but that you can also use a program to interpret it too if wanted and if you do then it is still simple.

I would also propose a unencrypted variant. The differences are: The URI scheme is "insecure-gemini" for the unencrypted variant, and 6x responses are not allowed (if a client certificate is needed, it should issue a 3x to redirect to the encrypted version and then the encrypted response will be 6x).

anigbrowlOP4y ago

I have no issues with the protocol - I really like it. I really want this to succeed. I'm talking about the way the protocol is presented to the world, the project as a whole. You need to show people it's cool, it's flexible, it can do useful things while also embodying privacy and low cruft.

Otherwise it ends up like Brainfuck - impressively clever, but you wouldn't want to use it for anything. It could be great for education or in many other contexts, but it's important to show something.

CRConrad4y ago

> Archie and Veronica

What I've always found hilarious is how stone-age the comic these were obviously named for was already then, thirty years ago.

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