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

[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.