[floren]

> the content you find on there is pretty much exactly what you would expect

Mostly blog posts about Gemini and Gemini software, in my experience...

Maybe it's time for Mercury, an even simpler protocol: you open a TCP connection, the server sends back a chunk of bytes consisting of ASCII 0x20 through 0x7e (and newlines). Clients must print the response to the screen verbatim. You "link" to other sites by including a hostname or IP address in the document; the user can then type or copy-paste that into the client's address field.

[eternityforest]

Make the protocol so boring you have to write about something other than the software? It might work!

I wonder if the mostly proprietary OSes and browsers has anything to do with the early internet's appeal. Open source invites you to improve and customize the software. Does the ability to do so change the psychology and put the focus more on the app itself? Is it related to entropy, where software has lots of other possible ways that it could have been done differently, all of which sit in ones mind like alternate timelines distracting from the present?

With open software software(Aside from ultra minimal software defined by a specific ideal) you can always improve it with some effort, so perhaps it's always disappointing to some degree especially to anyone who knows how to code?

It's one of the only things people do where there are frequent updates. A textbook might go years between editions. Painters will usually return to similar themes and subjects when they feel they could do better rather than redo a painting verbatim. Software is never done, and software people are never done thinking about it.

How can we get the same results in FOSS that we had on the early internet, when people just said "it works, lets use it!" without using ultra minimal stuff that once again is only interesting to tech tinkerers, and doesn't really do much?

[floren]

neocities.org is way more interesting if you want to see people just building sites for stuff they're interested in

[pram]

This makes me think of a gag from the Simpsons, where the only dialogue coming from a ham radio was "I have a ham radio"

[qingcharles]

When the Web first came online in the early 90s the only web sites I remember were "How to write HTML."

It took me about a year of having a browser installed before I started using the Web.

[lmm]

Finger already exists.

[jug]

And it’s been used for blogging too! How history repeats itself… I remember John Carmack’s finger blog.

[tedunangst]

I recommend port 17.

[floren]

Hush, this is a new movement, a rejection of old bloated protocols like Gemini and HTTP!

Also RFC 865 limits the QOTD response to 512 octets which isn't nearly enough.