Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS(brennan.day)
77 pointsby ChrisArchitect6 hours ago8 comments
  • sedatk5 hours ago
    Finger was the original Twitter. We used to get updates on Quake's development from John Carmack by fingering his email. He used to write elaborate ".plan" files too, no nonsense character limits were in sight yet. It was magical. It worked like this:

      $ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
    No retweets, no likes, no notifications, no HN frontpage, but John Carmack kept writing them, and we kept reading. Even without any amplification dynamics, it was still engaging.

    I've tried the same now, 30 years after my last finger. It wasn't even installed on Ubuntu by default. I had to install it, and expectedly:

      $ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
  finger: connect: Connection timed out
  • akkartik5 hours ago
    Wrt finger I want to point out https://plan.cat as a nice service in this spirit.
  • captn3m02 hours ago
    > Mozilla, which still maintains one of the only independent rendering engines (Gecko), is the only viable competitor. Everything else is Blink and Google.

    Notably missing Safari and WebKit

  • angiolillo3 hours ago
    Objections to Gemini that point out that nothing is stopping people from writing simple HTML miss the point.

    It's not that HTML forces well-meaning creators to add complexity, size, or user-hostile behavior; it's that an ecosystem that permits such behavior eventually becomes swamped by adtech and other user-hostile content for financial gain. The problem is that this content drowns out organic, human-centric content.

    Having said that, while format restrictions (to plaintext, markdown, gemtext, HTML without JavaScript) do help mitigate the damage somewhat by making tracking harder, I doubt they are sufficient: even text-only forums can become overrun with spam, ads, bots, and propaganda if they lack suitable moderation.

    Ultimately folks who want to browse a web of authentic human content need to combine format restrictions with blocklists and web-of-trust tools. Browser plugins, reader mode, and customized search engines can already get us partway there, but there are still gaps.

    • jvk7an hour ago
      Thats a big assumption. As Michael Goldhaber put it in the early days of the Internet - people have limited capacity to give Attention to anything but unlimited capacity to receive Attention. Scientists and technologists are not immune. And it shows up in what they cook up.
  • mlhpdx2 hours ago
    I’d love to see CoAP/wg play a part here. It’s similar enough to HTTP to be familiar, but not supported in any browser. It supports content types and server sent events. It can be implemented in far less memory and uses far less CPU than TLS. It seems like the perfect protocol for this kind of thing.
  • progbits4 hours ago
    Why is it that every gemini/gopher discussion throws out the baby with the bathwater?

    > Chrome alone controls roughly 73% of global desktop browser market share.

    > More and more, the webdevs of the world test and develop for Chrome only.

    > It doesn't need to be this way. https:// is not the only way to connect and interface with the Internet

    These are completely unrelated concepts! Google/Chrome doesn't control HTTP nor HTTPS. There is nothing wrong with the protocols, you can just make your website plaintext file if you like.

    • goldenarm3 hours ago
      Google almost shipped a DRM for the whole internet in 2023, and they will try again

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

      • progbits3 hours ago
        Yes that's absolute shit thing to do.

        It's also on completely different OSI layer.

        I don't see the difference between your comment and a statement like "I don't like email so let's stop using TCP".

        • goldenarm3 hours ago
          Yes WEI operated between layer 5 and 7.

          But the day your bank and insurance implement WEI, it'll going to be too late to switch to another protocol. Your existence will depend on it.

          • 9dev2 hours ago
            Honestly, I think at some point we will need something similar to WEI to ensure we’re interacting with other humans in a hostile AI internet.
    • thesuitonym3 hours ago
      You may be surprised to find out that the majority of gemini/gopher authors actually do have simple HTTP(S) sites. Some even have very complex HTTPS sites. Gemini and Gopher isn't really about getting rid of the WWW, it's about having a space that's entirely disconnected from it.
    • akkartik4 hours ago
      Why is it that every criticism of gemini/gopher throws the baby out with the bathwater?

      When you browse to a pristine html page containing zero adtech it contains links. Those links you might click on without first thoroughly vetting them for behavioral exhaust.

      Hyperlinks are a vector for contagion. A new protocol creates isolation. What's wrong with both existing? Defense in depth at all levels, I say. You think https can't enshittify, maybe you just haven't waited long enough.

  • unethical_ban6 hours ago
    I don't knock Gemini for existing and being a neat project, but even for hobby it seems too restrictive. No cookies means no authenticated interaction with a site, no inline images means it's less informative than a 100 year old encyclopedia.

    Perhaps a "Simple Web" spec could be created to audit a site and verify its privacy and simplicity protections. Things like "Cookies only for auth", "No JS" or "low JS", "No ref tracking in or out", "No tracking pixels", etc.

    • iamnothere31 minutes ago
      Inline images are a client implementation/styling detail. Some clients have it, but most don’t as most users don’t seem to want it. I believe Lagrange (the most “visual” browser) has this feature.
    • akkartik5 hours ago
      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.

      • CharlesW5 hours ago
        > 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?

        • akkartik5 hours ago
          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.
          • CharlesW5 hours ago
            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.
            • akkartik5 hours ago
              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.

    • JdeBP2 hours ago
      No inline images is not a restriction of the protocol. It's a restriction of the text/gemini MIME content type, and of the browser implementations. A server can still respond with text/html content over the GEMINI protocol, with embedded <image/> data. The GEMINI protocol specification does not restrict what RFC2045 types can be used.

      * https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/protocol-specification.gmi

      * https://iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

    • kai_mac2 hours ago
      I do think it's a shame that Gemini doesn't have images and richer text, but maybe it would be even less popular/successful if it had those. Gemini won't be the last of these simple protocols so it's a useful learning opportunity.

      My project at the moment is kind of related to these "simple web" ideas. Instead of giving up on HTML altogether I'm making a simple web browser, to see if there's a way to render even relatively complex existing pages, like Wikipedia or news sites, without needing to implement much or any CSS. A bit like "reader mode". (link if you are interested: https://codeberg.org/kaimac/weaver)

    • NoboruWataya2 hours ago
      Authenticated sessions are supported using client certificates.

      No inline images is a significant restriction indeed but it also gives you a high degree of confidence that most Gemini pages will be very lightweight. I don't find it that limiting. It all goes back to the point that Gemini is intended to supplement the web and not replace it - if you want image heavy content you can get it elsewhere. Personally I find the lack of inline formatting and links more frustrating.

    • SoftTalker5 hours ago
      Nothing prevents a gemini browser from showing inline images (though it might be officially discouraged?). They are just links.

      But actually loading images separately can work well. If you are reading for the text content you can save the time and bandwidth to load of all the images, or maybe you want to look at one image in detail, you can load just that one, and zoom or frame that independently of the surrounding text.

    • asdfalsrgkj3 hours ago
      How about:

      - no scripts of any kind

      - no cookies

      - no forms

      - all resources (e.g., styles, images) needed for display inlined

      - a spacious minimum cap on data URI length

      - elaborate the <a> tag a bit to allow a series of content addresses (hashes, IPFS, magnet URIs, etc.) for references

      Basically, a "dead" subset of HTML suitable for distributing documents.

      • captn3m02 hours ago
        I keep writing the same comment every time this is brought up, but browsers need to support text/markdown.
        • akkartik2 hours ago
          You'll need to be more specific since there are many variants of Markdown and the original explicitly permits arbitrary html.
  • ktallett3 hours ago
    I have started to try and always develop Gopher versions of my sites for my research work. I try and promote that version especially to those who live in countries where internet access is costly relative to income or internet access is limited. Usually the key differences are diagrams become ASCII based.