[foxfluff]

> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place, before this one collapses.

The implication being that the web can be changed? I don't believe that, I believe the web is broken and it's only getting worse by the day. I'm not going to discourage you from trying though.

> If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website [..]

> If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it [..]

Sorry, these are not answers for me as a user. When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra. And I'm also guaranteed not to have to play whack-a-mole with ublock/umatrix trying to make the actual fucking content somehow load. That's where the value is! "In theory, someone could make a nice website. Some actually do" is nice but it does nothing for my browsing experience in general, because the next link is going to be crap again.

[flohofwoe]

Disclaimer: I haven't (consciously) heard of this Gemini thing before, but:

> I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, ...

I guarantee this will only be true until it becomes popular enough to be a juicy target for the more - uhm - "business-oriented" people, it's not because of a restricted feature set.

Creating a technology which is intentionally uninteresting to business is an interesting angle of course which I can get behind ;)

[southerntofu]

Now tell the business people you can't display images and can't tell apart bots from "real people" on Gemini. They'll much prefer to keep their ads on the web. Being uninteresting to business is indeed a feature not a bug, but i agree with much of the author's criticism of gemini reinventing a square wheel: it's fun but a modern web subset would probably be easier to learn for many people while keeping backwards-compat with the rest of the world.

[shuntress]

> Now tell the business people you can't display images and can't tell apart bots from "real people" on Gemini. They'll much prefer to keep their ads on the web.

100% not true. They will simply pay less per impression for their ascii art ads.

[dopidopHN]

As much as I trust your garanties, you should have a look at Gemini capsules and the current state of the content.

I wish best of luck for ads to be serve and viewed at scale in there

[Karrot_Kream]

> Sorry, these are not answers for me as a user.

Sure, but there are plenty of users that are out there with different needs than you. Plenty of people out there don't deal with text well. One of the best parts of the web has been the ability to share images and simulations. Gemini space has no 3Blue1Brown and no Khan Academy. You can't watch a master cabinetmaker hand carve some dovetails. Gemini can't display textual math because the only thing text/gemini supports is UTF-8 text. There was talk in the early days of having screen readers and such but it's mostly gone unfollowed up on. There were a lot of debates about other accessibility things but the minimalist faction ended up winning over the pro-accessibility faction.

Gemini is only useful as a user if you're a software hacker who doesn't like math or images or videos or other media and have no accessibility needs. And it's borne out on Gemini space itself, as that is the core demographic of Gemini. To me Gemini feels more like a clique than an open space, where the text-loving cool-kids hang out. As far as internet projects that I feel are more inclusive (which isn't a high bar compared to Gemini), I find Usenet, Yggdrasil, and Secure Scuttlebutt better. There's a lot less waxing and waning about good and evil (and how the Geminauts are good, of course) on those places too.

[foxfluff]

> Sure, but there are plenty of users that are out there with different needs than you.

That's another discussion altogether. I agree Gemini is too limited, and I said as much in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069716

The fact that Gemini is not what I want does not invalidate the opinion that the web is broken, and Gemini provides answers for that in its niche. Likewise, other people wanting other things doesn't invalidate anything. We don't exactly have to choose one technology and solve all the world's problems with it. I'm ok with Gemini being what it is and I'm not pretending it is (nor should it be) everything for everyone. It's not much for me, but it's something.

[gnubison]

Gemini doesn’t aim to replace the web.

[grumbel]

> I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads

That seems more like an artifact of it not being popular than a feature of the protocol. If companies wanted to, they could just run native advertisement on Gemini just like they do elsewhere, just disguise the ad as regular news article and call it a day. Nothing stops them from putting banners on top of every page either or how about showing you an ad text before you are allowed to visit the actual content? You could even have a server-side wait time before you are allowed to move on from the ad.

Gemini just feels like rolling back the Web to an earlier stage without actually adding anything meaningful. If it ever got popular, it would devolve just the same as the Web already did, as it's nothing more than the same thing with a different paint job.

My personal take on this is that the core of everything wrong with the Web is the request–response nature of the protocol, as that allows to do a lot of crooked stuff on the server side, either intentionally (e.g. monitoring user activity, showing different content to different people) or unintentionally (e.g. causing broken links by servers going down). If the client gets plain-text or HTML really doesn't make a difference.

Another big issue is that publishing on the Web is far too complicated and expensive, which is why nobody is doing it anymore and instead relies on Facebook, Youtube and Co.

Something like IPFS feels like a much more valuable attempt as fixing the Web, as IPFS gets away from the request-response and turns the Web into a persistent data structure, that can't just be meddled with at the server side. It also makes publish substantially easier, as hosting is no longer tied to any single company, multiple people can host the same content and you don't have to pay and maintain a DNS record.

The part that is still missing with IPFS is a better replacement HTML. Stuff like pagination, image galleries, shopping carts, comments, etc. really need to become part of HTML, instead of stuff people hack together with Javascript or server side scripts. And how come we don't have an <advertising> tag yet?

Efforts in simplification should really happen on the users side, not in the protocol.

[sreevisakh]

> That seems more like an artifact of it not being popular than a feature of the protocol. If companies wanted to, they could just run native advertisement on Gemini just like they do elsewhere, just disguise the ad as regular news article and call it a day. Nothing stops them from putting banners on top of every page either or how about showing you an ad text before you are allowed to visit the actual content? You could even have a server-side wait time before you are allowed to move on from the ad.

The problem that people have with ads on the web is cross-site tracking and targeted ads. Gemini protocol does indeed prevent that by restricting one request to just one response. Non targeted ads wouldn't be a privacy concern, or even an attractive option.

[sangnoir]

> The implication being that the web can be changed?

Yes - the slice you visit can be changed for you by using the right user-agent (as suggested in TFA).

> When I browse the gemini space, I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads, harmful javascript, etcetra

Why can't gemini space be defined by "Content-type: text/gemini" sites linking to each other and/or a limited functionality browser that doesn't render content you don't like?

[foxfluff]

> Yes - the slice you visit can be changed for you by using the right user-agent (as suggested in TFA).

It's hard to call it the web if your user agent doesn't support the web technologies.

> Why can't gemini space be defined by "Content-type: text/gemini" sites linking to each other and/or a limited functionality browser that doesn't render content you don't like?

As far as I care, it could be.

The end result would be more or less the same: people would have this new format and a new bunch of applications that aren't compatible with the web. I'm not really interested in bikeshedding minor implementation details of that level.