Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

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If think what the parent is trying to say is; if this protocol is a subset of of we have today with HTTP and HTML, why not to create more of a political movement cheering for this subset to be use, the same way Google does with AMP?

On the technical side of things, it looks like its an old battle replayed with older weapons, just to get go through the same path of HTML. "Oh, but we will not put more features". Ok, but people wont use it then because they can also serve text, markdown, etc... and can chill out, because they know if later they need to serve images, videos or graphics, they can do it with HTML.

And i say this as a person who is also trying to create some alternatives to the web. But instead of going back to the nineties, i tried to think how the technology of 10 years ahead would look like. I've probably not maded it because its really hard to push the envelop when things are almost in the state of the art as Web is. But i also don't think the answer for the future will be in the past.

You know what i think would be a really badass movement. To create a simple spec of the Web, even without Javascript. Because with "feature creep" Google through Chrome is making impossible for others players to create competing browser engines.

So if two folks decide that they will create a web engine in this new language they like, it wont be an impossible goal. Because there's this simple version of the spec, with much less features.

The people behind this might be very good at convincing people and real believers, this thing can float for some time working real hard for this.. But it will be really hard to get this out of a small niche.

Anyway i love the thinking behind this. The meditation, the koan, is really on the right track. We need more rebels and fighters on this front. But i just can see it, how this can compete as a subset of a massively popular and deployed protocol with clients everywhere? How can it really differentiate itself, apart from what the web today already can serve to people?

The problem is that then you link to https://yourfriendsblog.org, and a couple years down the line your friend decides this safe subset is too restricting for them and decides to replace their blog with Wordpress with all the plugins and Cloudflare captchas and Google Analytics and evercookies and whatever else. The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.

When you link to a Gemini URL, you're linking to something you know can't be replaced with something privacy-violating in the future. The worst that can happen is the server shuts down, which is a very different failure mode. And someone is less likely to do that than to switch to a different brand of HTML - or so's the hope.

It's not going to be a major thing that everyone uses. That's ok! Neither is IRC, mailing lists, and whatever else - but people still use them, every day. There's ideas exchanged, friendships made, relationships formed, and they serve a not-insignificant community's needs.

> The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.

Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.

If you guys manage to have some 'killer apps' on this protocol, where people will try to reach it no matter how its is implemented, than there's a chance.

IRC killer app is IRC itself, and they manage to push themselves as alternative in the nineties where a lot of popular protocols and alternatives like the web were still in the beginning.

Anyway, if you convince people over time to serve their content through this medium, with enough and interesting content, the user will try/learn to reach them.

But i dont know, i think at least they should be trying to use some p2p DNS system, making it easy for people to serve their own content, or revisit BBS and serve contents in tree-like structures akin to directories..

I feel that there must be something to really differentiate it from everything else. Some things that are unique, and that the web + others are not covering. Because if you think about IRC or Email, they have distinct features that web could never cover even being a mammoth protocol, while this doesnt hold the same way when you think of Gemini proposal.

Anyway, people trying to do something, to change things for what they perceive as the better is a good thing, and it should always be celebrated, because even when the thing doesn't stick it might need adjustments, incremental evolution or just to serve as a influence to something else or through experience inspire the creators to create something even better.

> Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.

Who, exactly, without a profit motive, wants the majority of users? I don't want to talk to most people, and I don't want most people to read what I have to say. I, like most people I think, want to spend most of my time in my community sharing things I find interesting with people in my community.

It's the same as tilde servers, or MUDs. They're not going to take over the world. They're small communities and most people will never even know they exist, and that's fine.

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