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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.
Sure, but you don’t need a completely new protocol to speed up websites, learn HTML and CSS and you can easily create fast pages for anyone to look at, not just those with a highly specific client.
People tend to really suck at limiting themselves. If you’re wandering around in gemini space you’re not going to run into pages with lots of ad banners, trackers and other monetization BS. You pretty much can’t. On the web, you can run into simple fast pages but it’s getting less and less the norm. And the lack of easy ways to monetize means it’s unattractive to corporations, which helps avoid creeping enshittification.
Gemini is light, simple, and easy to parse. It’s just lightly marked up text. Compare the size of Lagrange with the size of Chrome or Firefox. And nobody is forcing you to use it. 🙂
You can use server-side forms to update pages, just like we did before front-end HTML became Flash 2.0.
Here’s a microblog service that’s built on Gemini that uses forms to get data from users. gemini://station.martinrue.com/
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.
The advantage is that it’s an obligate web 1.0 (-ish) experience. You aren’t clicking a link on a Gemini site that is going to take you anywhere crazy. There’s no tracking pixels and embedded content to get in the way.
It’s possible to attempt this by just following web 1.0 standards on your w3 site, and only linking to sites that do the same, and so on, but eventually there’s going to be a like button or an embedded video or something that ruins the experience. The web is messy.
Smaller spaces with constraints can be a lot of fun. Working within those constraints can breed innovation.
Sure, but untill web browsers support the protocol natively, it will never take off
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.
