Proposal about content-size and hash

On Tue, 3 Nov 2020 at 12:49, Ali Fardan <raiz at stellarbound.space> wrote:

>
> If so many people are not satisfied with the protocol as is without an
> insane amount of features, why don't you move to a different protocol
> that satisfies your needs?  Or rather, define your own, the only reason
> I'm interested in the Gemini protocol in the first place is the lack of
> features, yet ever since I joined this community the majority of
> discussion is all about feature proposals, why don't we get creative
> with what we have?
>

I assume the majority of people who suggest a feature want "gemini + X",
but everyone has their own idea of what X is :) If everyone built their own
protocol instead, almost all of those would be doomed from the get-go. To
get traction a potential new protocol needs to be appealing to as many as
possible -- and the creator needs to *reach out* to as many as possible at
that!

The most sold pie in the US is apple pie. It's pretty much nobody's
favourite, but it's virtually everyone's second-favourite.

The fact that so many feature proposals drop in suggests that Gemini has
done mostly everything right and appeals to a whole truckload of people.
It's a good thing, and it doesn't mean people *aren't* getting creative
with what they have (see
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/files/rfc_gemini_favicon.gmi for
example). The lack of content-size or hash is by no means a deal-breaker
for me; I'll find other ways to reduce bandwidth usage for my use case if
need be. But that doesn't mean it *wouldn't be useful*, for my use case or
others'.


>
> Petite Abeille have suggested the use of message/external-body MIME
> type defined in RFC 1873 for such thing, and I know this looks like an
> ugly solution, Guess what? so is adding content length to response
> headers, the protocol was designed to make it impossible to do such
> thing, lets keep it that way.  And by the way, you could outsource
> certain operations to external protocols if you really need that,
> gemtext allows a clean way of specifying links to different protocol
> schemes by design.
>

Well, if all I want is gemini + X, then using protocol Y with its bloat of
features I *don't* need is less tempting than sending a feature proposal to
the gemini ML. And again, that's a good thing! It means people are engaging
and shaping the trajectory of their own internet future. A rejected
proposal is a hundred times better than one that was never discussed for
fear of ridicule or social repercussions. The community is alive and
vibrant :D

Cheers,
ew0k
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