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by ubertaco 1042 days ago
I love Gemini, and I'm bummed a bit that the maintainer of my favorite CLI gemini client (amfora) doesn't have interest in it anymore.

For me, Gemini's a sweet spot.

Yes, Gemini is slow. I like that. I don't need dopamine hits of constant content, even if I _have_ become accustomed to them (he said, on a website designed to have fresh links for fresh dopamine hits all the time). I like a slow "let me check and see what's come in across the past day or two or three", with the selection being pretty manageable -- a dozen or so posts.

I like the lack of tracking, the lack of JS, the lack of CSS. It means that we're focusing on the words on the screen, not the gizmos and flair around the edges. It's plaintext at its best, IMO. You write your stuff, I'll set my client to render it however I like to read it, everyone's happy.

Yes, everything so far is just personal blogs. I love that. It's more genuine, because it's just people talking about what matters to _them_ -- not what "their audience" wants, or what drives engagement -- and that's where the real good writing lives. I don't want someone to give me some AI-generated spew so that they can get pageviews for ads, or to give me soulless marketing copy so they can promote their brand so they can get pageviews for ads or merch-affiliate links. I just want to pop into a little corner and hear someone tell me something about a subject they care about, and have my own world enriched by it.

My only complaint about Gemini, so far, is that I do wish discussion was more feasible. I've seen some duct-taped-together comment systems, but it'd be nice if that were more of an easy-to-use and easy-to-set-up thing.

1 comments

Gemini threw out the baby with the bathwater out while chasing simplicity.

The impossibility of inline media makes a huge amount of otherwise interesting content (tutorials, travel blogs, museum sites, personal hobby sites) boring and tedious.

The impossibility of "easy-to-use and easy-to-setup" commenting system stems from the same "so simple as to be nearly unusable" ideology.

I don't know much about Gemini beyond a cursory look, but I don't think inline media is impossible. IIUC it is up to the Gemini client to decide if it displays media inline.

My understanding is that Gemini clients don't display inline media in order to defeat privacy-compromising techniques such as tracking pixels. A Gemini client could very reasonably decide to show images inline if they are larger than 16x16 for instance.

It means you can't create content that you will know will display the same in different clients.