Asklemmy

I understand the sentiment, but... HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to "thing everyone uses" for no good reason.

It may not be particularly useful, but I welcome a challenge to the current status quo. The Internet is a powerful resource, and we're still building on top of the first protocol that worked back in 1991 to navigate it. Gemini isn't something I could see having any mainstream appeal, but it's absolutely worth experimenting with alternatives to the World Wide Web. Having more than one functional open standard could help revolutionize the Internet in novel new ways.

I like it. Everyone these days seems to want web pages that are 5MB of dynamically generated junk.

My little website is just static hugo-generated stuff.

Why?

What problem does this solve over simple HTML/CSS pages?

Outside of a very specific niche I can't see how anyone would choose this over normal HTML and HTTP/HTTPS, you'd need to run a new Gemini specific server to host Gemini specific files, created by Gemini specific softwares or Gemini specific developers, files that can only be read with a Gemini specific client.

This won't happen outside systems with highly specialized requirenments.

What is the point of a competing standard to html/https? It works pretty well? And CSS and JS are a big part of modern websites (sometimes a bit too big of course, but still).

Https is lightweight too, if you just don't add tons of CSS and JS dependencies?

I was an early adopter of Gemini and even hosted some stuff on there years ago, but ultimately I don't see a point when things like gopher exist and Gemini is a wasteland when it comes to interesting stuff to browse. Though admittedly the concept of an encrypted gopher protocol is pretty nice to me. I feel a lot more of the old internet feeling on there, i.e everyone else using it is a like-minded hobbyist with no corporate overlords. But even then things like activitypub that we are using right now also have that so idk.

CSS and js are nothing to do with http. In fact neither is html really.

It's just a protocol for transferring text.

Web 1.0 is beginning to seem like a golden age, isn't it?

Oooh I didn't know about this! Does it have a search engine?

EDIT: oh I see there is! Shoulda clicked through before asking lol

It's fine, I use Lagrange to read it sometimes, and there's a few gemlogs I follow. But it's in a weird space of "almost HTML, so why not just do HTML?"

Gopher still works fine, and has more clients (I still use Lynx). I like the clean separation of menus (even if you use a lot of i info lines) and documents. There's a bunch of gopher holes still out here. I haven't updated mine in a couple years, but when/if I move it over to a new server I will, as kind of a back-channel to the site & blog.

Another one of those "solution in search of a problem" things. It really doesn't solve any of the drawbacks of HTML/CSS, it just does the same thing in a different (way less supported) way.

I got super into it for a while but there just isn't enough "killer sites" to keep it interesting.

It really is just a little too minimalist. It's not really easily possible to do forums etc.

I like browsing it! You always find interesting people and writings about a wide variety of topics. It's got enough users to have variety but not so many that it feels in any way corporate. It's very much in line with the idea that limitations breed creativity. I'd highly recommend everyone download a decent browser and look around it a bit.

My only worry is that the Google Gemini AI thing will quickly suck all the air out of that name.

It's a cool idea and I was using it every day for a while. I love the gemtext format and I even made some "gempub" ebooks for fun. I have a site on flounder.online with some crap on it. Two things brought it all down for me.

The first is the hard TLS requirement. I've read all the rationales about this and still don't see the point. I get the principle behind it but it's not worth requiring that much infrastructure. It sucks all the fun and accessibility out of it. Which is my other issue.

We all know a platform can't be TOO accessible without becoming like twitter. But if accessibility is too low you'll end up with nothing but upper class tech workers moaning about the bougie problems that they created for themselves. The only capsules that had anything decent on them had HTTP proxies. It didn't feel like a platform worth contributing to for someone like me.

I've heard about the Spartan protocol which is similar but has no TLS requirement. I've been planning on getting into that but all I've done is read about it.

this sounds like the name of an ARG

First I've heard of it. On first glance, gemtext looks to me a bit like markdown except… it isn't. Frankly, I would love it if browsers had built-in markdown rendering since I'm using it more and more for readme files and what not.

I don't understand why this would exist over noscript + using the websites you actually want to use. If you want to spend time on minimal websites, there's no reason you can't use html and http to do it.

it looks like this was a college student's weekend hacking project and some people took it way too seriously and now have this social idea about how intentionally inferior tech is going to revolutionize... devolutionize? the internet. This is not snapchat. This is cave painting.

I just use noscript and call it a day.

It's just a tool for some some nerds to gatekeep content. Which isn't a bad thing per se because it can lead to building new interesting communities, but it's not really cool either.

i prefer the Omega Directive