| Most importantly for me is that nothing on HTTP protocol stops you from designing basic websites. A protocol is about the transport, not the content. This is the main fallacy about Gemini to me. So, nothing requires you to first jump onto an obscure protocol in order to present websites that support text mode web browsers and minimalist reading experiences. HTML is great for this. It has a decade long history and text browsers are actively supported. Then there is the protocol simplicity argument. HTTP is not a very complex protocol with great overhead as-is. Rendering pages is not a HTTP hurdle or even a HTML hurdle but a CSS and JavaScript hurdle. That’s where the complexity arises and you walling yourself off basic renderers begin. But doing so is a choice, not anything coming from HTTP or HTML. In fact, the situation has gotten _better_ over time with HTML 5 with improved semantic elements and deprecating styling elements. This makes it easier than before to understand and present a website in various forms. Or it should do so. Now there is the topic of obnoxious websites burdened with JavaScript and heavy, complex CSS but since this argument is about people willing to use Gemini, they are not the kind of demography that would design obnoxious websites, but clean and well-behaved ones according to the spec. So using HTTP and HTML is thus not a problem for Gemini minded people. Or it shouldn’t be. I think Gemini is mostly a psychological phenomenon. People were willing to do something for themselves that captures their ideology and intentionally walls them off because they wanted to more clearly feel part of a subculture. This is harder to achieve if you just subscribe to a minimalist, well-behaved blog service like Bear or Blot.im. The one thing I’d love to have today is native Markdown support in web browsers that could have a custom style sheet applied to them. You’d enforce simplicity in a similar way as Gopher or Gemini but in the normal web = way more convenient and lowering barriers. |