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by rglullis 334 days ago
My point is that the choice of protocol (much like the browser) is not a relevant factor if your goal is to be able to participate in the www without dealing with the issues.

We can have all the upside of an http-based web, without dealing with the downsides. The converse is not true. A Gemini network is by design limited in functionality, which is a downside that can not be mitigated.
1 comments
Gormo 334 days ago
> My point is that the choice of protocol (much like the browser) is not a relevant factor if your goal is to be able to participate in the www without dealing with the issues.

Right, but that isn't the goal of Gemini. It's goal is to create a distinct ecosystem, not to participate in the existing one with marginally less annoyance.

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rglullis 334 days ago
Even worse! This makes the whole proposal even more misguided.

Different ecosystems only make sense when we have distinct populations that might be as well considered different species.

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Gormo 334 days ago
There's no 'proposal' here -- this is a review of an active ecosystem that has already had its ideas implemented and iterated on for the past six years.

Having a different ecosystem is the exact intention of this project. If that's not for you, you're certainly not required to participate, but the world is a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global mean. Complaining that non-mainstream stuff exists seems pretty nuts to me -- the world is full of 'distinct populations'.

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rglullis 334 days ago
> a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global mean.

But they are all sharing the same world. It's all the same ecosystem.

My objection is not because I am against people trying to do something different. My objection is to this delusional idea that this work needs to be isolated from everyone else. It's sterile at best and elitist at worst.

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shakna 333 days ago
Its a protocol. A means of communication. It can't be isolated, by definition. There's plenty of cross-platform things using it.

It is as elitest and isolationist as RSS - another limited system.

The format is limited, to preserve the user agent's ability to act... As a user's agent, rather than the host. That's it.

Your objection seems to be... People walking a path you wouldn't.

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rglullis 333 days ago
If you want "an user agent that can act as a user's agent", you just need to use a better user agent. They exist. They work. You don't need a whole transport protocol to achieve that.

My objection is to the justifications people are using to walk this path. Even here, we have different people trying to argue completely different things regarding the isolationist nature. You say that it can't be isolated, Gormo says it's "designed to be airgapped".

Look, I've spent quite a significant amount of time exploring alternatives for a saner web. I've got on the microformats train. I know my way around the indieweb. I'm right now working on some stuff that I hope can make the fediverse easier to use and more accessible. I'm not saying to give up the fight. Quite the opposite: to me it seems that the Gemini crowd is just playing with their toy miniature soldiers and claiming that this is the best we can do. It seems immature and poorly-thought out.

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