[square_usual]

I agree with the author, but from a different direction. The Gemini community has this ethos that stripping away all the styling etc. makes the internet about "content" again. Setting aside for the moment that the definition that content = text is unnecessarily reductive (and insulting to other forms of content - is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content?), in my experience - people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols.

The people whose content I most respect are writing into a blogger setup that hasn't changed for decades, or into Wordpress's editor that feels like it actively fights you when you want to write. They like making it look like they want it to, and they like having analytics or getting paid for their content with ads or subscriptions. And on the other hand, barring one notable exception I haven't found anybody in the gemini space whose content I found interesting in itself. (Of course, that's just personal opinion - you might find many more people in the gemini space interesting.) And the moment I realized that a significant portion of the content on the gemini space was about implementing a gemini reader, it hit me that it was pure solutionism. Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!

(I could also go on about how the idea that stripping content of styles or """fluff""" is the only way for readers to get it on their own terms. I use stylus to override the font on every website I visit - it didn't require reinventing the wheel for that!)

[knowledge-clay]

> people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols.

> Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!

I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2020, The only thing being produced on Gemini now is "content", and there's more of it than ever!

[square_usual]

"Bikeshedding about internet protocols" doesn't mean bikeshedding the gemini protocol specifically. The Gemini protocol is stable, I'm sure, but what I mean is that people are more interested in discussing the tech especially vs http or whatever.

[cyber_kinetist]

Well, it still doesn’t seem to have escaped the narrow community of “geeks who are into tech-related things”. I’d really like to see things that I don’t already see on places like HN (because for these things I’ll just use HN).

[southerntofu]

I don't think gopher/gemini is geeks only, and the overlap with HN is certainly small. It's very popular in some communities such as the tildeverse where less-techie folks write on gemini as well. Last time i surfed on gemini (like a year ago) i was surprised there was so little technical content.

[duxup]

The great thing about the web when I came along with was all the character, good, bad or otherwise that personal sites, even some corporate sites that people build had.

GeoCities came along and things could be ugly, but it felt genuine.

Even just background choices or ugly gifs…

I miss the personal wonkiness and folks not afraid to make ugly sites.

The race to ultra minimalism feels as cold as a Facebook profile, maybe more.

[CookieMon]

https://search.marginalia.nu/ made the interesting observation that a big chunk of that amateur OG internet never stopped or went away, Google etc. just stopped linking to it and it went invisible.

[foxfluff]

Without numbers, it's hard to say how much of it is left. However, I do believe that a big chunk left and mere tiny bits of it are left. And of course, archives of old and now dead things..

The vast majority of people on the internet are not ever exposed to that kind of web (and most of those who were have moved on). How does someone even find out such a thing exists? How does someone figure out how to participate, if their entire web experience comes from facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram era?

In the 90s, the original amateur internet was something you'd be inevitably exposed to if you did anything at all on the web. Geocities was a thing, ISPs often offered free space for hosting personal home pages. I saw normies, total non-geeks make personal home pages because that's just the kind of thing people found on the web and wanted to try. My older sister had her own homepage. She's not a programmer and not a geek. Her site was a part of some webring, linking other sites made by teenage girls..

"Social media" was forums, likewise hosted by individuals, often in conjunction with their personal home pages, linking to other such sites...

I think the vast majority of it is simply gone.

[agumonkey]

It's a recurrent pattern. Cars used to be more diverse. Ecosystems tend to converge

I do miss these days too.

[southerntofu]

It's only a recurrent pattern because the capitalist machine is destroying creativity/leeway. Just like nature produces tomatoes (and other fruits/vegetables) of every color, but good luck finding a tomato that's not red in a supermarket.

Abolish capitalism and its central enforcement militia (the State) and suddenly diversity will be brought back to life. Without legal/physical threats (police/tribunals) and indoctrination (schools/media) to persuade the weird folks from being weird, we'll see more and more unique stuff.

[immibis]

I noticed this with restaurants. Old location (Australia): you drive to a McDonald's and get a quarter pounder. New location (Europe): you walk down the street and there are heaps of little unique eating places and small chains.

What causes the difference? I don't know. It might be down to city planning causing people to walk more and reducing the friction of entering a random store to get lunch. It could be something to do with real estate laws. It might just be cultural expectations.

Point is, this "big chain culture" is not universal and not inevitable. It's something we humans created in certain areas.

[southerntofu]

It has to do with the economic system and local urban planning. Many cities in Europe have refused permits for Mac Donald's to open shop, and that's a good thing. Because once settled, these megacorps who pay less than 1% taxes will take away all the business because they can have a bigger variety of products/services that a small shop can't afford, at a price driven by economies of scale that a small shop can't afford, treating employees in an illegal manner that a small shop can't afford to go to court over, and avoiding taxes through loopholes which small shops can't afford to know about.

If you can, don't let chains setup store near your home. If you can't, seriously consider getting involved in sabotage operations with people you trust. That's how Google ended backing off from Kreuzberg (Berlin) a few years back. Mac Donald's also had a few famous burnt-down "restaurants" here in France, but sabotage doesn't have to involve flames. A pack of sugar down the concrete-mixer will do the trick. If the shop has opened already, anything to block the locks will block business for at least a few hours.

It's David vs Goliath but if you've got support from your neighborhood you can win. Just don't ever think police and politicians are on your side.

[agumonkey]

Plausible but I think it's more generic than that. Evolution also filters out a lot of "creative" designs. Probably not as much as finance based markets I guess.

[gilrain]

I agree with your critique of capitalism, but beware the naturalistic fallacy: nature is similarly efficient and ruthless.

Wild tomatoes are red, tiny, and barely useful as food. The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.

[southerntofu]

> The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.

They've been groomed for generations, yes. But they've not been stabilized. When i talk about the variety of tomato colors/tastes, this is something natural that will happen over a few generations in your garden.

Plants will often borrow taste from other surrounding plants, as for color i have no clue what triggers them to change, but i've seen with my own eyes after a few years, new generations of vegetables starting to change colors (not uniformly across the entire garden). This of course is not possible with trees (eg. apples/oranges) as you would need to wait several generations of trees (that's a long time), nor is it possible when you plant seeds from the supermarket every year to replace last year's plants, as the commercial seeds are almost bit-by-bit copies of one another and will yield the same tasteless tomatoes bypassing the natural circle of evolution to your local environment.

If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops. At least that's the case here in France, where the government for many years made it illegal/criminal to share or sell "peasant crops" (which a judge ruled is legal only a few years back).

[gilrain]

> They've been groomed for generations, yes. But they've not been stabilized.

You must be using a different definition of “stabilized” than the horticultural sense, because it is absurd to suggest that tomato varieties are not stable.

> If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops.

I’m a member of a seed saving exchange and active in my local growing community. Horticulture is my primary hobby.

[duxup]

People can still make websites. I don’t think capitalism is to blame here.

And Gemini in this case is happy to achieve the same result.

[krapp]

But Gemini and its rigid, minimalist ethos wasn't created by capitalists, rather by anti-capitalists.

[southerntofu]

That's part of what's frustrating me about this! Usually non-profit projects/protocols are extensible, like the web and the Internet. This, despite the fact that for-profit corps try to appropriate/destroy the free/extensible platforms just like Microsoft/AOL tried with the Internet in the 90s.

So here, we end up in a situation that because silicon valley moguls exploited an extensible protocol (by hijacking the standardizing committee to their profit) we adopt a self-defense reflex of making everything minimalist to reduce the attack surface.

I'm interested in low-tech/ecology in general. For me, the equivalent in the physical world would be if you're not happy with a house using too much resources/energy so you decide to live without walls or floor, with a simple ceiling over the head. Sure it does the job of protecting you from rainfall, but does it fit all the other functionalities we expect from a home? I'm much more interested in a clay-based (or other local materials) housing, personally.

[tpoacher]

> is a beautiful animation not content? is an interactive map of a country showing how covid is affecting it not content?

Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things. It simply enforces a separation of those experiences from the text.

The reason this is a bad thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create rich user experiences.

The reason this is a good thing, is because you cannot use interactive maps and animations to create "rich" user experiences.

[southerntofu]

> Gemini does not prevent you from having any of those things.

I strongly disagree. By willingly limiting the markup, gemini actively tries to prevent you from doing these things. In contrast, what's wrong with the web is everything JavaScript and some early design issues with CSS, but HTML is good (although it could be simplified/improved).

xHTML more specifically is easy to parse and extensible so that different clients can implement more features. We need more HTML less JavaScript. In this sense, going the gopher route is a step backwards in my view, because it means for most of my practical needs (such as a simple user-submitted form) i need to stick with the web as we know it while i would be more than happy to take part and contribute in a privacy-friendly/minimalist subset of the web (as a standard i mean, i already do that on my websites).

[tpoacher]

I respect your disagreement, but I feel like you're disagreeing against the wrong point here though.

The main difference between gemini (the protocol) and http, isn't that a gemini page need only contain text and be deprived of all other kinds of context. The gemini protocol does not stop you from interacting with specific filetypes or other protocols, any more than http does. It's a protocol. It's up to people implementing clients to the gemini protocol to decide how to handle such externalities.

E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page, which I like. I haven't tried audio files, but I imagine they could probably work similarly if necessary.

Along similar lines, the gemtext specification is not intended as some sort of viable html alternative. It has completely different design goals.

So no, the point isn't about limiting the kind of content you can interact with. The point is, by enforcing a degree of separation between what is "content" (i.e. text), and what is "externalities", this makes simplicity of text (both in terms of presentation and production) the main driver, leaving externalities up to implementations (which may be as simple as encouraging actual external use, including an http browser for http content). More importantly, this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster, whose agenda may not match yours as a user.

And some (including myself) actually like this separation.

[southerntofu]

> E.g. the lagrange browser downloads images and displays then inline in the page

That's true, but it's based on opportunistic guesses, not semantics, which prevents many use-cases (including alt-text for accessibility of images). For example, we could do the same with video, but what about alternative soundtracks/captions? HTML has <video> <audio> and <caption>. Building a browser based on auto-guessing which link is related to which one and what the relationship is between those is... hazardous in my view.

> this allows the user to be in control over how these potentially abusable externalities should be handled, rather than ceding that control to the webmaster

I love that argument! But that was also the premise for the web, and i don't understand why we're not enforcing it there. CSS was supposed to permit user stylesheets, and JS empower users to script their interactions with the server. I would argue the problem with the web is it has moved away from declarative to imperative model where the server dictates your rendering. I can see how gemini addresses this by removing extensible declarative elements altogether, but i don't think that's the only way.

Personally, i think adding more semantic elements in HTML (eg. no-JS web components) would make client-side sheets more realistic while allowing the webmaster to propose a specific stylesheet for their recommended UI/UX. Removing the semantics is not gonna help empower clients, except when it comes to plaintext content. So, adding a new content-type over HTTP? Sure. Just throw in some CommonMark: it's well-specified and more or less complete (depending on your use-case). Adding a simpler protocol for delivering content? Why not, but it's not that easy to future-proof: HTTP is arguably more complex, but has some interesting properties such as content-type/encoding negociation or decoupling from transport security (for .onion/.i2p/DANE or any other future technology).

Just to be clear i like gemini very much and i've been wanting to support gemlog to my blog for a while. I just think there's room for some other technical foundations to explore the political promises of gemini.