why i don't use gemini, but it's almost there! - personal account

https://www.reddit.com/r/geminiprotocol/comments/1avikps/why_i_dont_use_gemini_but_its_almost_there/

created by useless_noob_help on 20/02/2024 at 14:12 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 top-level comments (showing 1)

PREFACE: i know gemini is not, and never will be "early web" and i agree this is what i want, and gemini will likely never provide this, i am also not an expert, just a hobbyist sat in his bedroom sharing his hobby with others, i'm just a guy, joe bob down the road, but hear me out.

i was coding my own website, i've been home hosting for the past 20+ years and my website has gone through a variety of complete recodes, i don't use any fancy stuff, no dev environments or package managers, i code in notepad++ (this practice is apparently considered "oldschool" or some would say "stupid" by todays standards? i digress)

i used to use php a lot but as my desires for styling and such grew bigger and i wanted more interaction, js become the solution... i was working with javascript and i found the need to geolocate the viewer as i had a 3d globe that showed all network traffic in and out of my network as great arcs around the planet much akin to icbm's ... and i wanted to show their own traffic in a different color, so i found various geolocation api's but the free tiers always had limits (ofcourse) - so i made a workaround where using javascript, i would simply have the users browser contact one of these free apis and report the result back to my server, i found some differences in the results however, so i ended up having users poll around 30 different geolocation api's, reporting them all back to my server and i would average the coordinates out...

it was at this moment i stopped and realised how messed up the internet is... i can, without any prompt or question, just send a users browser to another services, have them fetch any information and send it back to my server, and though my practices are benign, nobody is questioning what is possible should intentions be foul?

so finding this problem i stumbled on gemini, and a couple other older projects, i tried gemini but it is "too" restricting, i miss the internet of the early 2000s ultimately, where your website was your own style, it was your world, but it was static, no analytics, no cookies, no tracking, no scripts, no ads, no telemetry, just content, page, done

i've been toying with the possibility of making my own protocol, perhaps a fork of gemini, the largest downfall of gemini is inline media, and i understand that goes against gemini's own philosophy, and some (one?) gemini browser does resolve inline media links to the frontpage too which is cool, but not a real solution

i think there's a large number of people who's desires are in the middle of "modern web" and "gemini" - but for anyone else feeling the same, i found some resolve in using the plugin "noscript" - which is some behaviour i believe should be default in browsers, much like how flash and java used to prompt before you could run those scripts, noscript disables all scripting on pages and you can enable it for pages you NEED to use which are broken otherwise... it's a band-aid on the problem, but a quite effective one, however nuclear the solution may be

i understand this is not a request or a suggestion, and the proposed "shortfalls" and philosophy conflicts with gemini, but the reason i post here is because i hazard a guess there's many more in this demographic which have the same frustration with modern internet

it's just become a giant billboard generator with actual, valid, trusted, valuable information sinking far below "revenue generator" sites the likes of buzzfeed, i mean heck just trying to find a tutorial which isn't copy-pasted across 80,000 "tech news" websites and progressively typoed, rewritten, outdated and more it just makes it impossible, i find myself referring back to my old books than webpages these days it's so tainted, this is how i know we are going backwards...

should anyone have a large repository of old sites pre-2006 available to download i would love a copy, i have mirrored a large ammount of old sites from an ISP that accidentally exposed a very old webhost server from the days before they were an ISP which i was very fortunate to stumble upon... and i have a gargantuan ebook collection... so if the internet cannot be "fixed" - the very least i can download enough archived pages to keep them locally!

i do plan on making an online search engine for the sites i mirrored, so much like google you can search within these old webpages and ebooks for actual, valid information...

so much is being lost for the sake of generating revenue it hurts

Comments

Comment by shavetheyaks at 24/02/2024 at 07:05 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I don't have too much to add other than... I feel ya. I've also kind of found myself wishing that inline media and styling could be a thing in gemini. But I've (reluctantly) come around to the gemini conclusion for the same reasons you mentioned... once a site can "force" you download images to show them inline, you open the door for sites having you download things from anywhere.

Also I had an officemate a while ago who had a hard time typing who jerry-rigged an open-source speach-to-text, and that got me thinking about accessibility more. At this point I'm fine with giving up site-defined styling in favor of something that plays well with screen-readers, colorblind-friendly themes, and lysdexia-friendly fonts (which apparently comic sans accidentally ended up being?)

And our office went from using irc internally, where we could choose from any number of clients, to slack/rocketchat which locked us into one client. And I really found myself missing the freedom to choose how info was presented to me.

Not to tell you that you're wrong... because you're not... there's a lot of richness and expression that's missing from gemini. And I miss the old internet too. I've just (personally) come to the conclusion that the richness that we loved is also part of what enabled the web to become the trash it is now, and I've come to appreciate the hard lines that gemini draws to prevent that.

I do think there's a lot of potential in gemini for server-side fun that's going untapped though. I've only seen a few dynamic gemini pages, but what I have seen is always really cool. I think there's room in the protocol for things like old-style forums and turn-based games that could probably help fill the void that you're feeling. We've just got to do it ourselves. :3

What's your site, if you don't mind me asking?