[vtee44]

Gemini was doomed from the start. It barely extended the functionality of Gopher, it was basically just Gopher + Markdown, and it wasn’t even the full .md. I’m pretty sure it was impossible to really make a good index of pages because of how limited it is. I think even Gopher has some search engines.

It was probably even intentionally limited to be just protocol for making a blog without any user input. No possibility of making something useful on it. It needed just the forms support, but AFAIK the developers didn’t want that.

Basic HTML/CSS (without JS) would be minimal enough and even more accessible. See img’s alt attribute. You can view it on lynx or Netsurf, there’s no need to use huge clients for that. And even better, it was the way already.

I don’t get why would someone make a new protocol except for filtering people out. Why won’t they just focus on making minimal web services? As long as there will be something that’s not just software related, like it is often with Gopher/Gemini.

[The_Colonel]

> I don’t get why would someone make a new protocol except for filtering people out.

That actually appears to be one of the motivations. Which irks me out.

[flagrant_taco]

> I don't get why someone would make a new protocol except for filtering people out.

That could have been there intentions, I have idea, but if you think the web shouldn't have support for cookies or javascript, for example, then you really a new protocol. Even if you build a minimal web service, it still lives in a sandbox of third party cookiesand scripts, browser plugins, etc