[bayindirh]

Option “B” implies a cat and mouse game, which you can never win.

You can’t win a game designed and implemented by a mega corporation which is specially made to earn them money and protect their monopoly by being reactive and defending all the time. Instead you have to change the game and play with your own rules.

That’s option “A”.

[rglullis]

> Instead you have to change the game and play with your own rules.

That only works if you can convince the a substantial part of the participants to also play your game.

It's very easy to create an alternative internet where we can take away the power from incumbents. The hard part is creating all the activity that is taking place in the current one.

"Oh, but I can mirror the parts I want from the current internet into the new one!"

Not without playing into the same cat-and-mouse game.

[bayindirh]

Who says I'm trying to pull in everyone from the old internet to the new internet (Gemini)? If the people I care comes along, that's enough for me, and it's up to them.

For example, I switched to Mastodon, and follow people who I really want to follow are already there, plus I met a ton of interesting people, and was able to see real forms of people I followed before, so I have updated my views on them.

> "Oh, but I can mirror the parts I want from the current internet into the new one!"

Personally, I see Gemini or other protocols as equals to HTTP/S. For example, my blog is already text in most cases, has a full content RSS feed, so, also publishing a Gemini version is not mirroring what's on the web already, just adding another medium to my blog.

If I was pumping a 3rd party site I don't own from web to Gemini with a tool, then you'd be right, but publishing to Gemini is not different than having a RSS feed in my case.

[rglullis]

> For example, I switched to Mastodon (...) and was able to see real forms of people I followed before, so I have updated my views on them.

Isn't that strong evidence that it is possible to have a "human-scale" web built on HTTP, and consequently that there is not much benefit in restricting yourself to a protocol that is designed to be limited?

> Personally, I see Gemini or other protocols as equals to HTTP/S

Except they are not. Maybe it can do enough of the things that you care about, but Gemini is (by design!) meant to do less than HTTP.

> publishing to Gemini is not different than having a RSS feed in my case.

Again: if all you want is to be able to publish something in a simple format, then why should we care about the transport protocol?

I get the whole "the medium is the message" idea, I really do. I get that people want a simpler web and I look forward to a time where we have applications developed at a more "human scale". But I really don't get why we would have to deliberately be stripping ourselves of so much power and potential. Talking about Gemini as the best solution to the problems of the modern web is like saying we should wear chastity belts to deal with teenage pregnancies.

[bayindirh]

Yes, but it's important to understand that limitations are moved to Mastodon "layer" in that case. It takes careful deliberation and restraint to keep something tidy. Mastodon does this by limiting its scope and organizational structure. We as humans like to abuse capabilities. So, to keep something tidy and prevent (or realistically slow down) rot, you need a limit somewhere. Putting that limit to humans vs. the protocol is a trade-off.

In that scenario W3C doesn't put any brakes, Mastodon puts brakes on development, organizational structure and scope, and Gemini puts brakes on the protocol. So, it's the most limited but hardest to abuse in a sense.

I probably worded my "I see them as equals" part of my comment wrong. I know Gemnini is a subset of HTTP, it's more Gopher than HTTP, and that's OK by me. Moreover, that leanness is something I prefer. See, the most used feature on my browser is Reader mode, and I amassed enormous amount of links in Pocket just because of the reading experience it offered.

> I really don't get why we would have to deliberately be stripping ourselves of so much power and potential.

Because power corrupts and gets abused. A friend of mine told me that they now use Kamal which makes deployment easy. How it's deployed? Build a container -> Push to registry -> pull the container on the remote system -> runs the container -> sets up and runs a proxy in front of that container to handle incoming connections.

That's for a simple web application...

I mean, I push files to a web server and restart its process. I'm not against power, I'm against corruption, and given human nature, restraint is something hard to practice, and that's if you want to learn and practice it.

> Talking about Gemini as the best solution to the problems of the modern web is like saying we should wear chastity belts to deal with teenage pregnancies.

I never said Gemini is the only and the best way forward. Again, for me It's another protocol, which offers a nice trade-off for some people sharing a particular set of values. It's like a parallel web like BBSes or public terminals (e.g.: SDF).

Being an absolutist benefits no one. We should learn, understand and improve. We can have multiple webs, and we shall be free to roam them in a way we like. I'd love to use my terminal to roam some text only web with my favorite monospace font and terminal theme, but I like to write comments here and think on the replies I get, too.

I find myself preferring a text-only, distraction-free web more and more, and naturally evolving my habits and personal infrastructure in that way, but I'm not carrying a flag, shouting about end-times and preaching stuff as savior. I'm not that person.

[rglullis]

> it's important to understand that limitations are moved to Mastodon "layer" in that case.

Mastodon may be my preferred social network nowadays, but it's despite the prevalent philosophy from the development team. It's also arguably the reason that the Fediverse can not manage to grow to more than 1 million MAU.

>Because power corrupts and gets abused

The solution to this is not to get rid of power and keep everyone in the same small crab bucket. It's to make access to the powerful tools as universal and ubiquitous as possible.

> I push files to a web server and restart its process.

Your friend not being sensible enough to know when to use a tool vs when to keep it simple is not a problem of the tool. Also, talking about deployment methods seems so orthogonal to the discussion that I am not sure it makes sense to carry this conversation further.

[bayindirh]

> It's also arguably the reason that the Fediverse can not manage to grow to more than 1 million MAU.

Shall the number go up indefinitely? I don't believe so. Something can be attractive to a group of people and the number may float somewhere as people come and go. If the main aim is to make "the line go up", then the users become the product, and this is what I'm against in the first place.

> The solution to this is not to get rid of power and keep everyone in the same small crab bucket. It's to make access to the powerful tools as universal and ubiquitous as possible.

While stuffing people from a crab bucket is not the correct analogy for removing capabilities from the medium, I also believe giving people power to realize their dreams, but as you can see, this power corrupts (Meta, Google and Microsoft are great examples of things). Also, if we should give people all the power they need, then we arrive to the abolishing all law and regulation in all areas of the life.

What if someone have the dream of owning a bazooka and we enable them since it's a freedom, and they misfire it to a school bus?

What if we deregulate web space because people shall be free to do whatever they want in the internet, and somebody makes a fortune by selling targeted ads, and what if this ad platform is used to manipulate people to vote in a groomed way (Cambridge Analytica, everyone).

> Your friend not being sensible enough to know when to use a tool vs when to keep it simple is not a problem of the tool.

The tool is the result of exponentially increasing complexity of doing something simple. A perfect real-life example how modern web is bloating itself exponentially given its unlimited nature.

> Also, talking about deployment methods seems so orthogonal to the discussion that I am not sure it makes sense to carry this conversation further.

Please refer to above paragraph.

I agree that we look to the problem with a very different window, and you are not interested in a more minimal, saner or calmer space for distraction and abuse-free (or hard to abuse) environment. We're talking past each other. There's no need to continue this, since there's no desire to flex and widen the perspective.

With no hard feelings, have a nice day. :)

Hope to see you around in another thread.

[sneak]

Not really. You could have tinyweb/oldweb sites identify themselves with a meta tag, and have a browser that only browses those. A opt-in, web-within-a-web. And turns off js, cookies, and images.

You don’t need another transport protocol.

[Gormo]

How do you stop users who aren't using the custom browser from accessing these 'tinyweb' HTTP sites? How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you suppress direct incorporation of 'mainstream' web content into 'tinyweb' content?

If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web, and you're already going to have to develop custom clients, content formats, and server-side configuration to implement it on top of HTTP, and engage in lots of development work to imperfectly isolate the two ecosystems from each other, why wouldn't you just develop a parallel protocol and start with a clean slate?

[rglullis]

> How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them?

How do you that with Gemini?

> If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web

There is no way you can have an air gapped network with public access. The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET.

[Gormo]

> How do you that with Gemini?

You keep it isolated from the ecosystem in which all of those things are taking place.

> The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET.

The whole point is to minimize the chance of that happening -- by limiting mainstream appeal, keeping it a niche, and avoiding Eternal September -- and to maximize the friction of bridging these two ecosystems. And so far, they've done a fairly good job of it, since Gemini has been expanding for six years without any indication of any of this starting to happen.

[rglullis]

> and to maximize the friction of bridging these two ecosystems.

There is no friction. It's trivial to write a program that can scrape a Gemini network.

If there is no one pulling data from Gemini servers yet, is not because it's difficult do it, but merely because it's still too small to be relevant.

[Gormo]

> There is no friction. It's trivial to write a program that can scrape a Gemini network.

It's not trivial at all. First, you have to want to do it, then you have to commit time and effort to doing it, then you have to maintain the solution you deploy specifically for Gemini in parallel to your web scraping architecture.

> If there is no one pulling data from Gemini servers yet, is not because it's difficult do it, but merely because it's still too small to be relevant.

Exactly. But it if was using web tech, all of the existing web scrapers could just be pointed at it with minimal effort. So using a separate, custom tech stack is what keeps the threshold of effort in front the threshold of desire.

And using a separate tech stack also creates intentional friction in terms of new user adoption, keeping it slow and maintaining the protocol's niche status. So this also helps keep that threshold of desire distant.

[sneak]

Why would you need to? The big web existing doesn’t hinder or harm the existence of the tinyweb.

[bayindirh]

We have Kagi Small Web and Marginalia already, if that's your aim.