[akkartik]

You'd have to prove these things are possible in the face of the ingenuity of the entire adtech industry. The limitations you point out, on the other hand, have easy solutions:

* auth: Look at https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services Tons of services support some form of auth.

Edit: https://martinrue.com/station is another service I use that's missing in the above list.

* images: click to load

Janky but doable. Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

[account42]

What makes you think the adtech industry won't just embed ads in text if this becomes popular at all. You don't need any kind of technology for ads, only eyeballs.

[akkartik]

Adtech isn't about showing ads. It's about targeting ads. And yes, if Gemini gets wildly popular maybe they'll think of something. Good problem to have! New mistakes instead of same old ones!

[CharlesW]

> Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

I don't understand, unless adtech is holding your family hostage and forcing you to adtech. Can you elaborate?

[akkartik]

If you want to support cat pictures that show up without clicking a link, but prevent any behavioral exhaust from tracking pixels, that seems to be an open problem. Every new feature is like this: a risk surface until proven otherwise. So to reduce risk you have to limit features, i.e. jank.

[CharlesW]

The claim was, "Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech", but adtech cannot prevent you from making a jank-less, universally accessible page or site about your cats or whatever you like. IMHO, one really can't be part of the solution if one's left the protocols mainstream for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.

[akkartik]

You're right from the perspective of a website author, but the original comment I responded to is from the perspective of the protocol designer. There is no known way to design a protocol that can be used to create polished experiences without also letting some ingenious website suck up behavioral data.

> One can still be part of the solution without leaving the modern-standards-based mainstream altogether for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.

So many judging words there. A new protocol is an off-grid cabin in the woods, but building a non-janky universally accessible website isn't? You'll have to prove you can get a random new website more traffic over https without doing nefarious shit and letting the big adtech companies crawl it.

[ninjalanternshk]

Astute observation. Gopher is in fact a portal that lets you teleport from one off-grid cabin to another, all around the world. And some people like that.