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A day without the web

Posted on 2022-01-03

Yesterday I decided to challenge myself with not using the (big) web for the entire day.

The rules

There are some rules I wanted to follow, divided into what is allowed and what is not allowed:

Not allowed

Using a web browser to access http(s) websites, with two exceptions:

- University GitLab (needed for a university project)

- localhost (also needed for this project)

Allowed

Using gemini. Mirroring the web with gemini is also allowed, I used my own html2gmi mirror:

html2gmi

How it went

All in all, it went pretty good. The mirroring of html to gemini was mostly sufficient, with some websites needing adjustment of the templates used. But some parts were not that good, for example quickly wanting to search something on my smartphone, or some websites that required JavaScript.

I would say I have successfully done the challenge, with one minor exception. I once quickly used the browser to look up what files are on a web server, also for my university project.

There are some things that would have improved this challenge:

Search in amfora (my terminal gemini browser), currently a open issue with (it seems) nobody working on.
Better conversion from html to gemini (e.g. sometimes code blocks where not shown, which I could fix but then on other sites the code blocks would have broken). A improvement is on its way.

The future

In the future I definitely think that I will continue such a idea, but not that extreme. Only viewing the websites in text on my terminal instead of many bloated websites with cookie banners (even though I have disabled JS) is a great feeling. But I will still allow myself to use a normal browser if needed, for example on the smartphone where I currently do not have the mirroring set up.

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