[selfhoster11]

A couple of things to unpack here. The main argument that I would like to make is that hindsight of where we'd end up if we pick the HTTP way matters a great deal for Gemini's adoption.

Back when Gopher and HTTP were slinging it out, the future was unwritten. No matter which nascent vision of the Web we picked, it would be cool. 20+ years later, we ran the capability-maximalist (excuse the term) experiment to its logical conclusion, we know for a fact that a web in the HTTP/HTML spirit leads to a hellscape inhospitable to the privacy conscious.

In that sense, Gemini is not a nostalgic look. It's a recognition that we picked the wrong evolutionary branch and that we must step back and redo the evolution.

I don't think it can win against the Goliaths of Big Tech, but then I think that no-one will. It's a political problem with no technical solution, because ultimately it involves money. The only way to kill those Goliaths is to get the governments off their seats and get them to sling some stones.

Ultimately, I think that Gemini recognises that slaying Goliaths is not something it can accomplish. It refuses to play that game entirely, and instead focuses on carving out little chunks in the hellscape for those that seek them. It's not forgetting to learn from historical mistakes, it's simply abandoning the pretense that the HTTP web can be unseated.