Some thoughts about Gemini UX

On 2/22/21 9:07 PM, Hans Gerwitz wrote:

> I appreciate the need to avoid spurious network requests, especially
> across servers. But rules like ?user takes action? are impossible to
> enforce (and scrolling is an action). I?d like to recognize the 
> inevitability of inline media display

Firstly, "[when the] user takes [an] action" is a misrepresentation of
the consensus about making additional network connections, which I'd
summarise instead as "when the user explicitly requests that specific
additional network connection".

Secondly, this is currently not a 'rule' - the actual rule in the spec
(?5.4.2) is:
> however clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections 
> as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network 
> protocol
...which is technically much more permissive. However, the intent
behind this rule is clearly to improve privacy and reduce waste of
bandwidth, so the practical interpretation of the rule is a lot stricter
than just the "not automatically" in the spec. The 'rules' in
Geminispace are not just determined by the spec, but also by the culture
around Gemini, and they not "enforced" by some official authority, but
rather through interactions between people. That alone means that
auto-fetching inline media is clearly not "inevitable".

In general, it makes for unpleasant discussion when you assert something
without sufficient reasoning as a /fait accompli/, as an "inevitability"
that you are just "recognising".

-- 
pjvm

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