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Comment by juanbyrge | Hacker News Reader

A better approach to Gemini would be to create a UGC web app that allows people to create simple, text-only, markdown-enabled content that does not track users. And I think plenty of those exist already. It would be the circa 2004 era blogging platforms.

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And then someone adds some privacy violating javascript to their site, and everybody who linked to them before is now pointing their readers right back into the big bad web.

The creator of Gemini has a post about this, linked above.

My understanding of Gemini’s raison d’être is that the JavaScript-laden app-filled WWW is an anti-feature so doing anything with Gemini and web apps would be contradictory.

Probably won’t stop someone from trying.

Well, there's nothing stopping you from serving HTML/CSS/JS web apps over the Gemini protocol.

(Nothing stopping you from building a browser that handles gemini format documents and does special things with JS links, either, though to avoid accidental execution issues you would probably need to extend the format to distinguish “links I want to execute” from other links.)

All of that goes without saying, so the only real question is whether Gemini can resist the scourge of the modern web.

I'd like to say again that by competing with the modern web to do things that gemini isn't good at, gemini gets to lose those contests, and this should limit the success of efforts to to make dancing bears out of gemini.

I don't think this would be any better then a static site generator, or even something like Mastodon (assuming it has markdown support).

It's not better except that a person browsing doesn't know what pages are or aren't done with a simple site generator.

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