alt Hacker NewsGemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
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Wrt finger I want to point out https://plan.cat as a nice service in this spirit.
I’d love to see CoAP/wg play a part here. It’s similar enough to HTTP to be familiar, but not supported in any browser. It supports content types and server sent events. It can be implemented in far less memory and uses far less CPU than TLS. It seems like the perfect protocol for this kind of thing.
Why is it that every gemini/gopher discussion throws out the baby with the bathwater?
> Chrome alone controls roughly 73% of global desktop browser market share.
> More and more, the webdevs of the world test and develop for Chrome only.
> It doesn't need to be this way. https:// is not the only way to connect and interface with the Internet
These are completely unrelated concepts! Google/Chrome doesn't control HTTP nor HTTPS. There is nothing wrong with the protocols, you can just make your website plaintext file if you like.
Objections to Gemini that point out that nothing is stopping people from writing simple HTML miss the point.
It's not that HTML forces well-meaning creators to add complexity, size, or user-hostile behavior; it's that an ecosystem that permits such behavior eventually becomes swamped by adtech and other user-hostile content for financial gain. The problem is that this content drowns out organic, human-centric content.
Having said that, while format restrictions (to plaintext, markdown, gemtext, HTML without JavaScript) do help mitigate the damage somewhat by making tracking harder, I doubt they are sufficient: even text-only forums can become overrun with spam, ads, bots, and propaganda if they lack suitable moderation.
Ultimately folks who want to browse a web of authentic human content need to combine format restrictions with blocklists and web-of-trust tools. Browser plugins, reader mode, and customized search engines can already get us partway there, but there are still gaps.
> Mozilla, which still maintains one of the only independent rendering engines (Gecko), is the only viable competitor. Everything else is Blink and Google.
Notably missing Safari and WebKit
I don't knock Gemini for existing and being a neat project, but even for hobby it seems too restrictive. No cookies means no authenticated interaction with a site, no inline images means it's less informative than a 100 year old encyclopedia.
Perhaps a "Simple Web" spec could be created to audit a site and verify its privacy and simplicity protections. Things like "Cookies only for auth", "No JS" or "low JS", "No ref tracking in or out", "No tracking pixels", etc.
I have started to try and always develop Gopher versions of my sites for my research work. I try and promote that version especially to those who live in countries where internet access is costly relative to income or internet access is limited. Usually the key differences are diagrams become ASCII based.
Finger was the original Twitter. We used to get updates on Quake's development from John Carmack by fingering his email. He used to write elaborate ".plan" files too, no nonsense character limits were in sight yet. It was magical. It worked like this:
No retweets, no likes, no notifications, no HN frontpage, but John Carmack kept writing them, and we kept reading. Even without any amplification dynamics, it was still engaging.I've tried the same now, 30 years after my last finger. It wasn't even installed on Ubuntu by default. I had to install it, and expectedly: