💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001875.gmi captured on 2020-10-31 at 02:34:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Mercury

Phil Leblanc philanc at gmail.com

Wed Jun 24 21:47:44 BST 2020

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 2:27 PM Case Duckworth <acdw at acdw.net> wrote:

I think Mercury is a bad idea, at least for now, when Gemini is still very young and not established (or just established). For one thing, TLS was the main reason solderpunk even began thinking about an alternative to gopher (see gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/why-gopher-needs-crypto.txt), and it's really the most important part of the protocol. Specifically the concerns over censorship, traffic modification, PGP key transmission, etc. I think removing TLS (or some kind of crypto) is a bad idea for that reason.

I will check the Solderpunk's document. Thanks for the pointer.

Regarding Gemini vs. Gopher, I do think that the very simplerequest/response protocol and the great text/gemini document formatwith links embedded in the text are together by far _the_ great stepforward, from Gopher to Gemini.

If you don't want to use TLS, use gopher. Gemini isn't trying to be everything for everyone -- it specifically mentions that it's *not* trying to supplant gopher or http, and it's trying to be a *new* protocol, built from the ground up with modern sensibilities. Mercury is a step backward in that regard

I find it hard to follow you here. Do you imply that starting withMercury and adding TLS would be a step forward, in terms of _newness_?

remember how much work was put into the public education part of looking to the little green lock at the address bar of browsers, and how long it took for most of the web (even now, not all of it's https) to switch to https?

Definitely yes. And the same could be said about HTML and HTTP:remember how much work has been put in education and development andinfrastructure to put in place the web as we know it! -- Is it enoughof a reason not to try another way?

Best,

Case (acdw)

Thanks for your input. I want to reiterate that with respect toGemini, my biggest gripe is _mandatory_ TLS, not TLS itself.

I feel a bit like a guy discovering a group of people trying toestablish an utopian community from the ground up, based on fresh andfrugal principles. After digging a bit, I found that they mandate theuse of Toyota SUV for transportation in all the villages (because theyare available everywhere in the world and are efficient fortransportation).

Maybe villages without Toyota SUVs could also be part of the utopiancommunity? :-)

Cheers,

Phil