Gemini Protocol, Neocities, etc

[grayestofghosts]

I was bored today when I discovered the gemini protocol, a parallel/stripped down internet protocol (alternative to HTTP) that's meant to be lightweight, easy to use, text-focused...! so I downloaded a client to try to browse and the client itself is janky (search doesn't work) and the alternatives to the client on my phone are abandonware, and a disturbing amount of the capsules (equivalent to websites) were dated early in the pandemic. I had hopes and my dreams seemed to be crushed in a couple hours. I mean I'm sure there's still stuff, I would just have to access it differently. But it's such a big idea, no?

I've been slowly updating my Neocities website and at this point the web resources page has a decent amount of links. I feel like I should probably write an essay or so on blogging, and why it's important, even though, hypocritically, I do not keep up well with this blog. I don't know. I've added analytics to the website just to see what happens. I am very tempted to add a guestbook and such. I looked back and saw that I had commented out a chatbox that I had attempted to add, and looking at the site I'm thinking, wow, a chatbox goes totally against the vibe, doesn't it? But I think it could do with a guestbook. It could probably do with a lot of things that I don't know if I'm going to get to. One thought I had was to add my fanfic onto the site. It's mine, so why not?

Comments

[axolotls]

Might run into some trouble with comments boxes and the like due to the new Content Security Policy, just FYI.

[grayestofghosts]

Considering the guestbook is hosted on a separate page at atabook.org rather than on neocities itself, I doubt it, but it's good to know that goat counter widgets might not work.

[biteshelter]

I think I first heard of Gemini when it was more active. From what I remember, it was popular in the Tildeverse. It's a shame it didn't really stick around after that. I wonder if some of its philosophy made it back into the small web movement(s).

[grayestofghosts]

I don't know if it really had much effect. My first thought when I saw it was "no inline images? Gasp!" and I'm kind of wondering if other people had the same reaction, even if inline images are actually the root of all evil on the net, which it seems pretty probable they are.

[biteshelter]

That's a fair point. I think the lack of inline images is a hard sell for a lot of people. I wonder if people would be more amicable to it if you were able to browse/request a directory as a gallery. Maybe something like gophermaps, but separate from hypertext.

My thought was that the general ideas around making simple and lightweight capsules might have carried over to some personal websites. You're probably right about it not having much of an effect, though. I know people in the Tildeverse usually have to deal with limited storage and command-line text editors, but I'm not sure if the "lightweight modern internet" approach reached anyone outside of that. I think everyone else who wanted that sort of space just returned to (or never stopped using) Gopher, IRC, unstyled HTML, etc. Gemini was nice because it made use of modern security standards and other newer ideas while enforcing the lightweight approach.

[grayestofghosts]

Tbh one of my first thoughts for a use case for Gemini protocol was to integrate it with e-ink readers, because the lightweight text-only formatting would be great for it. You would just need to be able to figure out how to break downloaded files into pages on the fly, and maybe be able to grab and download a whole capsule at once to browse, putting books up there to be grabbed would be an incredible use of it. However this is exactly the opposite of what big publishers would allow for and they mostly have a stranglehold on the industry.

Seeing how well they would go together and not really being able to do much about it (not only because of my lack of technical expertise to make a Gemini client anyway) is... depressing.

[biteshelter]

That'd be a cool usage of it. It does look possible client-side. The Gemini protocol itself may cause issues, though: I found some downloaders out there, but Gemini requires a new cryptographic handshake for every page loaded, so downloading whole capsules would be slow.

Adoption is a huge hurdle. Gemini raised the barrier to entry to prevent large-scale use by requiring a new file format and browser support. That kept the protocol to small community, but there wasn't enough going on to keep the community going.

Maybe someone out there would be willing to host their own personal writing archive on Gemini or Gopher for easy downloading, but HTTP has more support and can also transfer plaintext, most people don't want to host their own site, people using HTTP would probably want to add styling, and you could include a converter to make epub files directly... and that's where fanfiction archives already are. Getting any sort of momentum for plaintext adoption seems difficult.