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solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Wed May 13 22:10:08 BST 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ``` On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 09:07:00AM -0700, Dave Huseby wrote: > Now...let the trolling begin! Let's see who can flame each other better. ; ) It would be great if we could just refrain from trolling or flamingeach other entirely -- even weird, happy-smiley pseudo-trolling -- andjust have normal conversations, which can of course include polite andadult disagreement! Just weighing in on a few points quickly: > > > Right now the only thing we can do is willfully > > > blind our servers. Eventually though, if all goes according to plan, > > > Gemini servers will be running on a mixnet of some kind > > > > Really? I don't recall seeing such a plan myself. Solderpunk, are you > > holding out on me? > > You're not wrong. I made a mistake implying the Gemini had *anything* to do > with my efforts fix the Internet status quo. I'll admit that I've never given serious thought to alternativetransports, but the spec *does* take care to say "When Gemini is servedover TCP/IP, servers should listen on port 1965", implying that it mightbe done over things other than TCP/IP. I could have *sworn* I alsoexplicitly called it an "application layer" protocol, but apparently not.I *will* fix that, it's always been my intent. If people want to run Gemini over some sort of new-fangled mixnettransport layer that's absolutely fine by me, and I'd regard suchexperiments with keen interest. But as far as I'm concerned that'slargely orthogonal to the Gemini spec proper. To some extent, the spec privileges TCP/IP, or rather transport andinternet layer protocols which don't provide any encryption. TLS isdesigned in deeply enough that removing it would be problematic, whichmeans means that there is guaranteed to be some redundancy if thehigher layers provide security features of their own. I would rather address this when and if any such alternative layersachieve significant traction by introducing a separate, relativelysimple new specification - in the spirit of DNS over TLS or HTTP -rather than trying to totally generalise the spec now. If these newlayers are so radically different that refactoring Gemini to work overthem isn't trivial, then people can just define a new protocol native tothat transport which is heavily Gemini-inspired, in the way that Geminiis heavily Gopher-inspired. This reflects my general stance on the appropriate balance for Geminito strike between philosophical and technical considerations. I don'tthink it will come as a surprise to anybody that I'm an idealist. I aminterested in making the internet a better place, and I consider Geminito be doing precisely that. However, I have pretty humble ambitionswith this project. By the standards of a lot of projects concerned with "making theinternet a better place", Gemini looks decidedly old-fashioned orconservative. It's client-server and not peer-to-peer, content ishosted in one place on the originating server and is not replicatedacross requesting clients, and stuff is addressed by location and notcontent. Heck, it doesn't even have a blockchain in it! These decisions obviously place a limit on just how revolutionary we canbe in fixing the ills of the web. But I also think these decisions areone of Gemini's great strengths. Gemini should feel overwhelminglyfamiliar to most technical people, both in terms of the primitives it'sbuilt from (URLs, MIME types, TLS) and the conceptual ideas that jointhem together. I think this fact is in no small part responsible forGemini, despite being small and young, already having no shortage ofimplementations. Meanwhile, the internet is full of - and has been fora long, long time - more ambitious, radical projects with a lot more"cognitive friction" which haven't taken off. I welcome input from hardcore idealists and philosophers, because Ithink it's good to keep one eye on the stars (an appropriatemetaphor for this project!). But I'm going to meet those idealsonly as far as I think we can while keeping Gemini conceptually lightand easy for people to pickup and begin working with. We won'tcompletely solve every single problem with the web this way, butwe'll make real improvements. Incremental progress is still progress,and widely-deployed progress is the best kind. Cheers,Solderpunk