Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with most of these discussions is they assume Gemini is a substitute for the web, when it is actually a substitute for Gopher.

Gopher never really went away. A few enthusiasts were keeping it alive. Those enthusiasts realized that Gopher had a number of shortcomings, so Gemini was created to address those shortcomings. It was not created to address the shortcomings of the web. (At least not directly. Indirectly one could argue those enthusiasts kept Gopher alive due to the shortcomings of the web.)

As for styling and inline images: in a sense, Gemini offers styles to a limited degree. Those styles are tied to the structure of the document, while the appearance is left to the software rendering the document. Even though inline images are considered a faux pas, I seem to recall Lagrange offering that feature. Again, we are dealing with the rendering software making the decision rather than the author. Since the end user chooses and configures the rendering software, it is the end user who has control (rather than the author).

I think this is true only up to a point. The sets of Gopher enthusiasts and Gemini enthusiasts surely overlap, but they are not coterminous (disclosure: I administer gopher.floodgap.com).

From my view in Gopherspace, Gemini is a better fit for the Gopher+TLS thing people keep trying to do which is both incompatible and doesn't square with Gopher being an ultra-light protocol, and thus most appealing to those people who thought Gopher would be the "new smol web" but found it's more its own thing. In particular, Gopher's signature strong menu-document hierarchy that a lot of us Gopher nerds like doesn't have any true parallel in Gemini.

I started gopher.floodgap.com back when it was gopher.ptloma.edu in the late 1990s largely as a historical preservation because I remembered all the cool stuff you could get there. Back then the Web hadn't metastasized to the Tetsuo blob it is today, so that obviously wouldn't have been the reason. I can't speak for the later adopters, but Gemini doesn't scratch my Gopher itches fully (see also https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-gopher-view-of-gemini.... , my notes on this from 2020).

I didn't mean to suggest that Gopher and Gemini enthusiasts are one and the same. Rather, I meant to suggest that it was a subset of Gopher enthusiasts that decided to address some of the shortcomings of Gopher. At least that is the impression that I received while watching from the sidelines. It never really struck me as being a derivative of the web.

And thank you for gopher.floodgap.com. While I had some exposure to Gopher in the mid-1990's, most of my exposure was through Floodgap (and SDF) in the early 2000's.

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