Gemini Ain’t Broke

Gemini is good the way it is and a lot of the proposed changes lately stress me out.

I didn’t want to care about Gemini.

I’ve said many times that I saw it as “more specs”, as part of the web, part of the problem with the web’s complexity and not the solution.

I reluctantly jammed a capsule together, thinking “what’s the harm”.

Every time the community was proposing changes that would make it worse I would try to remind myself that I didn’t need to get worked up, that I didn’t need to care, that I didn’t agree with the idea in the first place, that it’s just an offshoot to my normal homepage, that I don’t get this invested in Atom or CSS spec stuff.

I was wrong.

I do need to care

I do need to care.

One reason is the community, which, as with everything else, is Sturgeon’s Law, but I’ve found some capsule gems.

The other is the whole… Often it feels like everyone on the web and the Google and Apple app stores is out to get you. A razor in every apple. Here in the EU, GDPR has made that clear: I go to what I’ve always believed was someone’s cozy, personal recipe web site and up pops ten thousand “legitimate interest” checkboxes. (It’s not that GDPR is bad, I appreciate it for exposing the maggots in the woodwork that had been there for a while.)

The idea that sites also can bitcoin mine on your machine with JavaScript is also pretty messed up.

On Gemini, there’s none of that paranoia. It’s just text. Sure, there’s the occasional dork that tries to submit half a gigabyte archives to Antenna but for the most part it’s just text. If I’m reading a gem file I know that I’m just reading a gem file.

End of an era

Slopes can be pretty slippery and I just remember so clearly how the original web got gradually messed up.

• Tables for layout as opposed to data.
• Images for texts as opposed to pictures.
• Bad taste in font design and selection. OMFG Verdana with its messed up X-height that made everyone use font-size puny so that every non-Verdana machine was messed up.
• Frames. So awful.
• Broken, unfinished tags leading to the entire rest of the page being in italics.
• That time the entire web was just huge blocks of broken puzzle pieces because everything was Java and Flash.

It’s gonna sound weird but CSS and JS made things better, not worse, because people could then do the messed up and ugly things they wanted to do in a way that was easy to disable. For a brief while, until that, too, was exploited to pieces. Popups and XSS and tracking and rest in peace web.

It could easily happen again to you folks

That is what Gemini is in the future if we’re not careful. Gemini has become this precious, cozy thing. It works. It’s good. There’s good stuff there.

If Gemini becomes the web, what, then, is even the point of Gemini?