knowledge-clay

> I find Gemini pretty accessible overall. There are no images, so including alt descriptions isn't even a concern. There's no CSS, so you can't make controls that visually look like check boxes, but are much less accessible. In fact, it's way harder to make an inaccessible Gemini site than to make an inaccessible website. The only gripe I have is the possibility to introduce ASCII diagrams, which usually aren't accessible.

The provides an alt text tag to preformatted text blocks for this purpose:

> Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line which toggles preformatted mode on MAY be interpreted by the client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines which follow the toggle line. Use of alt text is at the client's discretion, and simple clients may ignore it. Alt text is recommended for ASCII art or similar non-textual content which, for example, cannot be meaningfully understood when rendered through a screen reader or usefully indexed by a search engine.

I deleted that part of my comment because it wasn't my main point

I don't come to Gemini from the Gopher community, but the advantages are listed in section 2.2 of the FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html

Gemini is fantastic. For anyone interested in experimenting with it without setting up a server, I've been working on a simple Gemini site builder that works over HTTP and serves the content via Gemini and HTTP proxy:

https://flounder.online/

In my view, Gemini's bare-bones text format is its killer feature. Non-technical users have been able to easily write Gemtext based on a few examples and a bit of experimentation. This gets users away from WSIWYG without forcing them to learn something as complex as HTML. And unlike Markdown, it is clearly-specified, universal, and doesn't compile to anything else.

Many people criticize Gemini for lacking this or that feature, and being basically useless for "practical" applications. I wrote an blog post about this:

https://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-01-08-useless.gmi

> no javascript

To be clear, sourcehut does occasionally use JavaScript, it’s just very conservative and optional.

> Average users value performance, cost, and battery life. The cost efficiency and capabilities of cloud compute will always outpace that of consumer mobile devices. So remote compute with zero user control is inevitable.

I don't think this is a question of what users value, it's a question of what large software companies value. Non-technical users absolutely value their privacy and freedom even if they don't put it in explicitly ideological terms: they want to pirate copyrighted material, they are annoyed by paywalls and ads, they are creeped out by how much social networks knows about them.

> Contrast this with the (hypothetical) option to record everything using your phone, without meaningfully impacting its battery life, while it was still in your pocket. I think most people would actually opt to do that, even if it was technically illegal in their jurisdiction. There's just not really any downside and a whole bunch of potential upsides from the perspective of an individual.

I think we have fundamentally different views on what non-tech people look for out of technology, because I definitely disagree that “most people” would want to do that.

> We're living in the gold ages before everything we do within eyeshot of anyone is recorded like that Black Mirror episode anyone can review/share anything they've seen with their own eyes.

I very much doubt that. Just because it may be technically possible to some degree at some point doesn’t mean that anyone would be interested in it. It’s technically possible today to wear a mic and record everything you hear and say for your entire life, but no one does that, and most people would find anyone that did very weird.

The security and privacy implications of this are horrifying to me, as are they to enough of the population that I doubt this will get widespread adoption.

Is anyone concerned about the effect this has on the night sky and astronomical observation?

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/starlink-sa...

True, but my terminal, web browser, phone, and text editor don't render base64-encoded images in-line, nor is base64 encoding part of the Unicode spec. Emojis behave much more like text than like images.

I would argue that emojis would fit within a technical definition of "text". They fit inside the text/* mimetype.

This increasingly happens to me. It won’t make me switch to Chrome but it’s an extremely worrying sign. I remember the New Yorker subscription page was totally broken in Firefox, and have had issues with login for my credit card

A good UX is great for a single app, but standards compliance is great for the entire software ecosystem.

I believe that there is such a thing as good, responsible engineering practices, such as supporting open standards, that companies ought to to irrespective of "target audience". I'm not saying using IMAP is a better user experience and that everyone should use it, but I believe that any email provider has a responsibility to support IMAP.

> That’s all super fair, but they also argue this direction allows them to innovate as well.

That's true, but I would argue, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that email is an area where we don't want or need much innovation. Email works fine and has for decades. In many cases, "innovation" (except at the protocol level) has made things worse.

HEY looked interesting until I found out they don't support IMAP. When I think about the problems with email, I don't think primarily about the interface, but about the fact that the open standards on which it is based are increasingly being ignored.

Imperfect and stable+standardized is preferable to unstable+unstandardized, in my opinion.

This is what firefox does

Implementing a lightweight Activitypub social network in Rust. Put together an alpha instance with some of my friends on it. https://github.com/alexwennerberg/gourami

Because trans people exist, and this isn't really up for debate, it's accepted by all mainstream medical and psychological associations and is demonstrated in practice by the lived experiences of millions of trans people.

Singular they/them is not esoteric -- it is recognized by most major style guides, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Chicago Manual of Style, among others.

I don't know the situation at hand well enough to say whether the policy was fairly enforced, but the policy itself is not unreasonable.

If, for example, someone had the same stylistic practices as the OP and also wrote hateful things about trans people on Twitter, it may be more likely. Or if they use a certain style when referring to cis people but use a different one when referring to people with they/them pronouns or trans people.

I don't find it to be unreasonable. If a trans person clearly states that her pronouns are "she/her" and you twist your sentences around to avoid using pronouns at all, that could certainly give the impression that you don't recognize her identity as valid. I am not saying OP did this or did this intentionally but it's not an unreasonable policy. It sounds to me (without being intimately familiar with the situation) that OP has esoteric stylistic preferences that are not transphobic but happen to be consistent with the language that transphobic people will use.

Pronoun use is pretty straightforward. If someone says their pronouns, you use their pronouns to refer to them, just like you would anyone else. It may feel a little disorienting if you don't talk to many trans people and, for example, they use singular "they" or have a pronoun that seems different than the one that you would naturally assign to them based on their appearance, but it's not difficult and you can get used to it pretty quickly.

The reason that people are so sensitive and strict about this is because the stakes for trans people are very high -- some people don't believe trans people exist, should exist, or should have the same rights as cis people. Refusing to use the right pronouns reveals either a benign misunderstanding about trans people or a willful hostility towards their existence. The latter is extremely common and can be both hurtful and often scary, as trans people, especially trans people of color, are often subject to violence because of their identities.

> The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc.

Public money and grants avoid all of these problems. In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.

Very cool! Without sign up, how do you deal with spam?

Anecdotal, but I have Google Fi and I receive about 5 to 10 spam calls a day.

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I use GIMP occasionally and find the UI horrendously confusing. Every time I use it I have a web browser tab open with "How to [X] in GIMP".