this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).
In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone's niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
I used text-only browsers back when web2.0 shit was just getting started for years and I am prepared to go back to them. We don’t need any of this. We never have.
This is correct but it is such a frustratingly hard sell to a younger generation, in my experience. Every god damn thing is in Discord now, a glorified IRC server with less security (somehow!) and minimal if any capabilities for locally hosted backups, and no one gives a shit lol. Decades of YouTube videos can not be archived, but it doesn’t matter. Hit that little bell icon, gamers
I tried Gemini once, honestly found Gopher to be noticeably superior, and on several fronts.
Gemini feels like someone was throwing a tantrum at the modern web and decided to overcompensate by rolling progress back like 45 years to Web 0.0001255 Standards.
How so? I'm going to tinker with both regardless, but I'm curious to know what you found lacking with Gemini so that I can evaluate it with a more critical eye.
Mostly that even for something three decades newer, it does nothing with the newness except bad things: it doesn't allow for more than one (1) link per paragraph, if at all. Doesn't have a concept of text alignment, text weight, spacing, italics, underline or any of the other stuff CSS 0.1 inherited from the historical printing press. To my recollection, doesn't even allow you to use any alphabet set that is not English's one (so stuff like math equations are out of the question), and you can't post a link that has international characters (like the wikipedia page for "Ñandú") without hideously percent-escaping them. In 2024.
In exchange, Gemini seems to require SSL and a certificate of all things, which means it's a lot costlier to implement on low-end hardware and it's noticeably vulnerable to tactics like domain seizure because you need a valid cert which means you need an external "naming authority".
Looking at it from a distance, it feels like someone looked a Gopher and went "I wonder how would this feel in the format of a brutalist buttplug".
On the plus side tho, thanks to the lack of anything even resembling formatting, Gemini does realize one thing that I don't recall Gopher realizing in full: rendering of the document is under control of the viewer, not of the author. For good or bad.
Another thing I like about Gopher is that it was designed essentially to be a mounted read-only networked filesystem. Works well with the whole UNIX philosophy of "everything is a file".
Oh I didn't recall that part, might have to relearn some things of Ye Olde Gooden Times, but if so, that's wonderful!
~~Perhaps there is something like mount.gopher in the AUR already....?~~
I'm not sure about the Linux world, a quick search reveals https://github.com/ewe2/gopherfs which seems like it'd do the trick.
I'm dumb. So does Gemini feel like 1998 internet, or something even earlier?
It actually feels newer and fresher (kinda 2000-2002-ish) despite it technically being limited to a modeling and rendering of documents in the style and paradigm of about ~~1994~~ 1974.
Credits where it's due, tbh.
Completely agree! I like to limit myself to HTTP 1.1 and any website I'll ever make will just be simple handwritten HTML with some CSS. I like to use elinks and xlinks for hypertext but in some cases -- like lemmy -- I'm unfortunately forced to use a bloated browser that supports JabbaScript and black magic (which makes no sense because online forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, etc. in the past all used to work without any JS). I like Gopher/Gemini a lot but I find it hard to discover interesting holes/capsules.