💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2022 › 202210 › 20221011-some-weaknesses-of-gemini.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:39:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I believe that all people have a fundamental right to privacy and a freedom to associate how they choose. I also believe in the right for all people to speak freely and express themselves how they wish, even if what they say is untrue or unpopular. I suspect many of my fellow Geminauts feel the same. To these ends, I've long been interested in censorship-resistant technologies, tools that enhance privacy, and secure communication systems.
A core pillar of free discussion is a strong do-it-yourself attitude, which is pervasive on Gemini. As such, the Gemini community (as well as Gopher and other small Internet protocols) is an open and friendly place, willing to have serious discussions without outright vilifying each other. However, that does not mean Gemini itself is a perfect protocol to facilitate this kind of discourse.
One important criticism I've read about Gemini is that it is still not immune to advertisements, and not completely immune to tracking either. For example, each page on a capsule might be served as a CGI script that injects text advertisements into the body of an article. A large company invested in Gemini could build such a CGI-oriented server quite easily. Similarly, companies could require visitors to have a certificate (analogous to many sites requiring an account on the mainline Internet) to access them, ostensibly in the name of "providing more features"--this would enable extensive intra-site tracking. Were such a company to launch many large-scale capsules, or partner with other companies that do, cross-capsule tracking could become feasible.
Fortunately, the do-it-yourself nature of Gemini provides a natural defense to these particular dangers. Gemini users tend to strongly oppose online advertisements and other exploitative business practices, so they would naturally steer clear of such a capsule. Further, any capsule that required a certificate simply to read seemingly-static content for free would likely raise a red flag--hobbyist communities don't do that. It's far more likely that a friendly Geminaut would build some kind of proxy service and serve the content to others openly.
Other pitfalls are still present. For example, mandatory TLS gives Gemini a layer of security, but the protocol is not private, and it's not anonymous either. The closest thing Gemini has to in-built privacy is the 61 return code, warning a client that its certificate is unauthorized. However, there is no mechanism to authorize a certificate within the protocol--that must be done by other means.
Gemini's self-sufficient spirit also makes it censorship-resistant, but it's important to remember that Gemini it not inherently more censorship-resistant than the Web. A self-hosted Web site with a domain purchased from an independent registrar is just as free from censorship has a self-hosted Gemini capsule. In this case, whatever forms of censorship can happen to Web sites can happen to Gemini: ISP takedowns, domain blacklisting, and so on. Gemini is not immune to these.
Some people consider an artificial lack of discoverability as a form of censorship (i.e. being removed of Google search results or being shadow banned on Twitter). Gemini mostly lacks large aggregation hubs, but that's more due to the nature of the community than due to the structure of the protocol. Were a multi-service capsule to dominate Geminispace, analogous to Google or Amazon, such a capsule could choose not to provide links to certain capsules--that's a decision of the operator, and not something that can be blocked by the protocol.
The good news is that Gemini is not completely defenseless against the traps that the Web fell into. I see Gemini as more of an extension of Gopher than a reduction of the Web, and there's a reason that Gopher has maintained much of the community spirit that the Web lost so long ago. That reason is Gopher's stability--and Gemini is largely stable too. Gemini deliberately aims not to be extensible, and the limitations it already has have been carefully thought out. Being not just text-oriented, but line-oriented, makes it difficult for companies to build Gemini capsules that hook readers using cheap dopamine hits, and the community is not the type to simply accept out-of-spec additions to browsers and readers. This is probably the best weapon Gemini has to fight against rampant corporatization.
I love Gemini, and I want Gemini to remain an open, friendly place. I will do my part to keep it that way. However, just because the community is this way now doesn't mean it'll automatically stay that way forever. The protocol by itself won't protect us.
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[Last updated: 2022-10-11]