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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

I wondered the same thing... why invent a whole new thing? Making a web browser capable of displaying the Internet circa 1999 is not trivial but it is far, far, far easier than building a modern one.

Let's keep it simple: HTTP 1.1, HTML, CSS 1 (maybe), _no_ JS.

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It's about building an ecosystem. Its way easier to build a community of users and content which display on an 80 char terminal when the protocol only supports it and every link links to more content which follows the same restrictions.

IMO Gemini is not a solution but a toy. Nothing wrong with that, its fun to have toy protocols and communities, but it isn't useful to many.

I think because the inevitable result of that is that you constantly land on broken pages, just by following links, even if you start in some kind of enthusiast area that caters to such a browser.

You could mitigate that by only linking to pages that implement the HTML subset deemed valid. And instead of linking away to another domain, you could syndicate those pages on a centralized domain so to prevent loading dangerous or slow content on the open web. We could call it something like Accelerated Mobile Pages.

The spec of Gemini state that a Gemini web client should be writable as a weekend project for a experienced dev.

Very impressive that people can write TLS clients in a weekend, on top of building Gemini clients and Gemtext parsers.

I have sincerely not idea. I skipped over any https talks because it was not fun to look at and assumed folks would have a dependency. There is a list of client/server in a bunch of mainstream languages, did those people had to implement TLS? That sounds like work.

Having this as a priority nicely demonstrates how dev-centric and user-ignorant this project is.

Is that so wrong? Must everything we create be for the masses to consume?

It's not wrong, it just demonstrates how super niche it is.

The distinction between devs and users is less sharp when everything is as simple as the Gemini ecosystem. And that is precisely what they want: technology that is resilient and does not (and will never) depend on a caste of specialists and large corporations such as Google, like the web does.

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