I do think Gemini suffers from a dearth of interesting content, which is interesting because the content you find on there is pretty much exactly what you would expect and the things that feel missing are the things we often bemoan about the web.<p>If you look at an aggregator like [0] you see 10-15 new posts a day, which actually isn't a bad level of activity. But it's all just people's personal blogs. Which is fine and, again, is probably how it is intended to be. But unless you have a personal connection to these people or happen to be intensely interested in all the same things as them, it's difficult to stay interested in their personal blogs.<p>Things you don't really find in Geminispace (unless it is mirrored or proxied from the web):<p>- news or serious journalism<p>- any kind of social media<p>- any kind of interactive content<p>- any kind of multimedia content<p>Some of that is due to inherent and very intentional limitations of the protocol. Some of it is just due to the community being much smaller (ie, the web has plenty of interesting text-only content that could be on Gemini, but is not).<p>I still like Gemini and will continue to browse it, and it's important to point out again that it was never intended to replace the web. But I remember to check in on it less frequently now and it seems I am not alone.<p>0: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
> Gemini is a reaction to bloated modern websites<p>Correction: it is an <i>over</i>reaction to bloated modern websites. Interesting in various ways. Artificial constraints in an era of gratuitous excess can be useful to trigger creativity but my sense is that the territory Gemini revisited is simply too well trodden. Not a particularly fertile ground to seed an alternative universe. Heraclitus said, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on."<p>Added thought: The vision of a lean web is more than valid, but it needs to add something new and exciting even while it subtracts a lot of useless bloat.
This article really resonates with me. It lots of ways I want to like gemini but when it really comes down to it the content just isn't very good.<p>Secondly, the restrictions seem great until you really could use a diagram or an actual equation or a million other things that aren't just plain markdown basically.<p>I am squarely in the wheelhouse of people who should be into gemini. I <i>love</i> the terminal. I have used vim for 25 years and emacs for a good 5 or so years before that, I have used textmode browsers and extensions like vimium etc to make my non-textmode browsers be more texty. My own website is almost entirely just plain text.<p>If it was obsidian-style markdown (ie including embedded images, latex and tables and especially diagramming using something like mermaid or excalidraw) it would be amazing[1] but as is, it's just not quite enough to actually be used for anything other than what's on there which is basically people just navelgazing or talking about gemini itself.<p>[1] And I expect that slightly less restrictive palette would make it attractive to a lot more folks to produce content for and therefore it would be a lot less like a barren technohipster wasteland as at present.
I love Gemini, and I'm bummed a bit that the maintainer of my favorite CLI gemini client (amfora) doesn't have interest in it anymore.<p>For me, Gemini's a sweet spot.<p>Yes, Gemini is slow. I like that. I don't need dopamine hits of constant content, even if I _have_ become accustomed to them (he said, on a website designed to have fresh links for fresh dopamine hits all the time). I like a slow "let me check and see what's come in across the past day or two or three", with the selection being pretty manageable -- a dozen or so posts.<p>I like the lack of tracking, the lack of JS, the lack of CSS. It means that we're focusing on the words on the screen, not the gizmos and flair around the edges. It's plaintext at its best, IMO. You write your stuff, I'll set my client to render it however I like to read it, everyone's happy.<p>Yes, everything so far is just personal blogs. I love that. It's more genuine, because it's just people talking about what matters to _them_ -- not what "their audience" wants, or what drives engagement -- and that's where the real good writing lives. I don't want someone to give me some AI-generated spew so that they can get pageviews for ads, or to give me soulless marketing copy so they can promote their brand so they can get pageviews for ads or merch-affiliate links. I just want to pop into a little corner and hear someone tell me something about a subject they care about, and have my own world enriched by it.<p>My only complaint about Gemini, so far, is that I do wish discussion was more feasible. I've seen some duct-taped-together comment systems, but it'd be nice if that were more of an easy-to-use and easy-to-set-up thing.
I love the idea of Gemini. But I also find myself forgetting it exists. Maybe the addictive way we do web design this days is the culprit. But, honestly, maybe is just the content quality.
I like the idea of Gemini, but having just a subset of the web's functionality is not enough.<p>While it might not be a perfect analogy, many prefer using the terminal/shell/TUIs is because it is more powerful and efficient than the alternatives.<p>And even though I appreciate Gemini, I wouldn't say that it is more powerful and efficient. Granted, that's not its goal either.
i love the spaces that gemini created, but agree that (from a protocol and technical standpoint) gemini and gemtext were more "frustratingly inferior" rather than "elegantly simplified".
Gemini felt to me like the web's quiet cabin on a lake. I'd view through a terminal emulator on a Mac Classic.<p>The lack of infinite content makes it peaceful and manageable. The lack of search (or maybe it exists and I just didn't care to find it) makes finding little haunts and communities more rewarding.<p>It's just some personal blogs about synthesizers or cereal recipes- but it's genuine and not people trying to build a brand. No one is trying to sell you anything. It's felt totally uncorrupted.
when i consider alternatives to http, i find that the main thing http is missing is a directory index at protocol level. it should be possible to browse the structure of a site without having to load and interpret a full html document. an index would help discovery of the site, especially, but not only for users of accessibility tools.<p>those who don't like html can easily host only text files if they want to. the main limitation here is the browser lacking a two pane directory/view mode
I think Gemini just went too far with how much they got rid of.<p>I think the ideal middle is using a stripped down HTTP subset, with HTML5 (maybe with some things removed, like script tags), and the latest CSS.<p>No JS. Focus on the document. Make any changes needed to improve things. No crossdomain cookies. Maybe no cookies at all. Only GET and POST maybe. Only allow some very specific headers maybe and strip anything else. Figure out a more novel system for secure transmission, maybe by default.<p>I'm thinking of starting something with Servo, I know it's not HTML5 yes but it could be a good way to limit things. Or maybe Libweb from the Ladybird project.
I think Gemini could have been fun for vintage and low powered systems, but then they slapped a mandatory TLS requirement on top of it. That's the entire reason I have no interest in Gemini.<p>It doesn't provide anything that HTTP or Gopher can't. I don't see the point.
The author of that post makes a good point: using Gemini <i>offers no advantage over how I already use the Web.</i> I think that goes for more than a few people, and not just the author.<p>Admittedly, I've never dived deeply into Geminispace, but it's never held my interest. Like the author of that post, I can get all of what I need online with my web browser and RSS feed reader.<p>But, hey, if you enjoy using Gemini (as a reader or a creator or both), then stick with it!
IMHO the problem with Gemini is that "a subset of the web's functionality" is a very broad definition and it's hard to find consensus on whether that subset corresponds to 1% or 99% or something in the middle<p>I think the ideal project starts closer to the 99% but allows for graceful degradation down to 1% with little beyond a TUI, some colors and hyperlinks. That requires creating the right infrastructure for servers to offer a "stack" of content built something like (text + (hyperlinks + (images + (css + (video + (animations + (...)))). Clients can then be developed to handle whatever portion of that stack they want to.<p>This at least has the advantage of lowering switching costs for <i>users</i> who want to explore this "new web" while also allowing nerds like me to experience the web "the right way" with no distractions<p>However, the elephant in the room is that is is hard to imagine content creators would be in any way incentivized to think about their content in terms of that stack. Reddit just wants to force everyone to use their app, text-and-hyperlinks be damned. There's a reason RSS feeds have died.
I do like Gemini but still question whether the development of a protocol was necessary. Couldn't you replace it with webrings and a crawler to index them?
I loved playing around with Gemini. Something loosely along those lines can definitely work. Who knows what will become popular in the future. Extreme web page bloat leaves the door open.<p>Here are a couple of other alternative ideas for the web:<p><a href="https://freenet.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://freenet.org/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet">https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet</a> (an idea, not implemented)
I tried to get interested in Gemini, I really did. The problem is that a lot of it is self-hosted, and there isn't really a great index or search engine that I've seen. That self-hosting means I'm locked out of participating for the time being, and the lack of search means it's hard for me to find anything of real value.<p>I want to see it grow. But right now, it's inferior in my eyes to even the current Gopher hole hosters online today.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this. I want to like the idea of Gemini, but it currently doesn't have, and is difficult to impossible to build, anything to really draw users away from the conventional web.<p>I think the fundamental idea of a new protocol that's much more limited than the current HTTP + HTML + JS web platform still has merit, but Gemini is just too limited to get going. It's tough though to design something that's flexible and feature-full enough to be really useful and not too hard to implement, but not so much that it will inevitably be extended to be basically what the web is now.<p>Thinking about it a bit, I think the idea for required TLS and client certs as the only way to ID users is good, as is lack of support for arbitrary HTTP headers and JS. I think what really kills a lot of potential functionality is the total lack of support for sending any data back to the server by anything other than basically query params. I think it ought to be possible for somebody to build a Super-Gemini that just support some equivalent of POST and some simple equivalent of HTML forms in addition to what it had, and should still be pretty easy to implement.
Most importantly for me is that nothing on HTTP protocol stops you from designing basic websites. A protocol is about the transport, not the content. This is the main fallacy about Gemini to me.<p>So, nothing requires you to first jump onto an obscure protocol in order to present websites that support text mode web browsers and minimalist reading experiences. HTML is great for this. It has a decade long history and text browsers are actively supported.<p>Then there is the protocol simplicity argument. HTTP is not a very complex protocol with great overhead as-is.<p>Rendering pages is not a HTTP hurdle or even a HTML hurdle but a CSS and JavaScript hurdle. That’s where the complexity arises and you walling yourself off basic renderers begin. But doing so is a choice, not anything coming from HTTP or HTML.<p>In fact, the situation has gotten _better_ over time with HTML 5 with improved semantic elements and deprecating styling elements. This makes it easier than before to understand and present a website in various forms.<p>Or it should do so. Now there is the topic of obnoxious websites burdened with JavaScript and heavy, complex CSS but since this argument is about people willing to use Gemini, they are not the kind of demography that would design obnoxious websites, but clean and well-behaved ones according to the spec. So using HTTP and HTML is thus not a problem for Gemini minded people. Or it shouldn’t be.<p>I think Gemini is mostly a psychological phenomenon. People were willing to do something for themselves that captures their ideology and intentionally walls them off because they wanted to more clearly feel part of a subculture. This is harder to achieve if you just subscribe to a minimalist, well-behaved blog service like Bear or Blot.im.<p>The one thing I’d love to have today is native Markdown support in web browsers that could have a custom style sheet applied to them. You’d enforce simplicity in a similar way as Gopher or Gemini but in the normal web = way more convenient and lowering barriers.
I am going to give my cynical self a pat in the back. Back in March 2022 I was calling out Gemini as a fad that had no reason to exist. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802376">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802376</a>
µprotocols are fun. try text://protocol for that truly minimalistic avant-garde experience. [01]<p>[01] <a href="https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main">https://github.com/textprotocol/public/tree/main</a>
There's a certain sense of irony in the fact that the same people who don't see the point of gemini "when HTTP exists" and "when there's nothing stopping you from writing a simple no-frills html page" also seem to be the same people who love 50 shades of markdown and bend over backwards to support it, yet would never dream of writing the equivalent in html unless it was as part of a framework.
I am doing something using Gemtext, but not the Gemini protocol.<p>Basically - it's a decent way to "start over" and not be HTML-compatible, which is important if you are moving away from the owned-server model of hosting(which I am). It recognizes that it's not Markdown. The inline limitation is something I am probably going to breach at some point.<p>Gemini itself is something I admire, but like Gopher, it offers few frontiers for exploration.
WWW is a superset of all these small fun protocols, none of them offer anything the web isn't capable of, but they are great examples of sometimes what's fun is the limitations, not the features.
There is always a song:
<a href="https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/XRnjPSkVdt8</a>
Gemini was doomed from the start. It barely extended the functionality of Gopher, it was basically just Gopher + Markdown, and it wasn’t even the full .md. I’m pretty sure it was impossible to really make a good index of pages because of how limited it is. I think even Gopher has some search engines.<p>It was probably even intentionally limited to be just protocol for making a blog without any user input. No possibility of making something useful on it. It needed just the forms support, but AFAIK the developers didn’t want that.<p>Basic HTML/CSS (without JS) would be minimal enough and even more accessible. See img’s alt attribute. You can view it on lynx or Netsurf, there’s no need to use huge clients for that. And even better, it was the way already.<p>I don’t get why would someone make a new protocol except for filtering people out. Why won’t they just focus on making minimal web services? As long as there will be something that’s not just software related, like it is often with Gopher/Gemini.