> Just recently joined your email list after lurking for a while
Welcome! Glad to have you here (keep that in mind as I disagree with you below).
> Is there a simple and gemini-friendly way for us to (optionally!) convey
> this sense of place.
At present I think Konpeito Media (gemini://konpeito.media) is a great
example of providing what you are talking about.
They offer color, as well as a non-color mode. Many gemini capsules also
use figlet fonts or other forms of ascii and unicode
art.
My feeling is that gemini inherits more from gopher than from the web.
Including a lot of the culture that has surrounded it in its early days.
That doesnt mean that things need to stay that way, though I admit my
preference is to avoid styling almost entirely. Styling, to me, misses the
point: that the content is the important thing.
> browsing gemini-space is a very homogenous experience
I think I disagree with this. I think coming from the web, yes that may be
true. But users that have been using gopher have had the
mental shift to interacting with this sort of content for quite some time
and the subtle differences in how text is arranged can have
a big impact and really create a style and flavor for each capsule. It
just takes a little distance from the maximalism that is the web.
People that drink a 2-litre of cola each day are used to sweet and think
that a sparkling water with a bit of lime has no flavor. But if
you stop drinking soda for awhile your taste starts to return to a more
normal realm. I think this is true of gemini and gopher as well
when contrasted with the web.
As you likely read in the discussions surrounding bullets, there is
definitely nothing stopping servers and clients from serving up and
rendering html or markdown and having the styling that comes with those. I
cannot speak for everyone, but my feeling is that the
text/gemini format is intended to be very simple and to allow consistent
display across devices (many of which do not support color
or font size changes).
I would definitely be interested to see if we can find some ways of
achieving what you are talking about by creating a culture and
community that finds creative ways to use text to really give gemini a
feel of its own. While I cited Konpeito above, I know that
the escape sequence thing is a fun hack, but that graphical clients will have trouble.
I do think we should be providing alt text to ascii art blocks, maybe like so:
```smiley face
o o
.
\___/
```
Anyway, sorry for the opinionated ramble. Really: truly glad to have your
voice in the discussion (as well as all of the other recent
new folks to this mailing list and to gemini in general).
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