💾 Archived View for senders.io › gemlog › degrowth-and-bespoke-protocols.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:03:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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gemini://gemini.ucant.org/gemlog/2023-06-17_re_degrowth_and_its_discontents.gmi
gemini://beehiveth.smol.pub/lonely-small-web
For me the issue is path of least resistance. Gemini AND http are both quite good TCP based protocols for serving miscellaneous media. While they both have their bundled media type they're really really good at just serving any content while having a fairly robust protocol.
So when you're designing a backend internet service or a user facing program - why bother with TCP sockets when you can just use good ol HTTP and get all the protocol design for free. And that isn't even to mention the fact that they also come with this great GUI program and its own markup language to make custom displays. And they can execute arbitrary code (web browsers). It's just starting to look more and more appealing.
Now we all know this I could've skipped saying as they all basically did because we're all here now we understand what went wrong and why it did. But its just shitty because bespoke protocols and systems are really really great.
Having a standalone program that speaks an efficient protocol to communicate between itself a server and other servers perhaps is great. As put in.. ucant's? reply post there was a plethora of protocols and communication forms. And being able to move discussion of posts that maybe don't warrant an entire blog reply over to say IRC or email is great. And early gemini that's basically what you would do! I'm sure it still happens and I do get the occasional email :) (I always appreciate them) I am curious how bbs will affect this? Is there discussions about this post, my posts, posts I was debating writing a reply to happening outside my purview?
And that last bit is the other downside. Centralization (even if decentralized centralization) is just EASY. And we're all super lazy (in a nice way).
With the slow death of reddit (that's been happening since it was released) I've often considered "could there be an opportunity to basically do whats said here for community forums?"
I've made quite a few failed attempts at posting about "What could we do to solve the community forum issue" that doesn't just repeat the same mistakes. I made a decent attempt at this on my fedi where I lamented folks basically recreating reddit (kbin/lemmy) without really solving its major UI/UX problems. Reddit is a bad website. Like its always sucked super hard. It's why 3rd party apps were necessary and at a minimum RES. Those used to be NECESSARY. You couldn't inline open images for the longest time without RES. night-mode, RES only (is it still RES only?) but yeah. And not to mention it was a design philosophy meant to be a link aggregator and discussion forum. But turned into a community hub. But it lacks a lot of the community hub features, or they were partially and poorly baked in. Reddit Wikis are trash.
So yeah. What are we to do? Could there be an opportunity to make a server system that talks a forum protocol that, like gemini, shifts the display onto the clients? Should wikis be moved maybe into a MediaWiki on HTTP? Since well, that's a prebuilt purpose driven open source wiki engine? And will/should be discoverable and searchable from the internet?
Yeah. This was a ramble. But it helped me form some ideas and maybe sparked some creative folks to think of their own. I really don't wanna spend my vacation half assign some client/server for community hubs :/
Yeah.
Gemini can be lonely. Sometimes I feel I put a lot of effort into a post only to see maybe 15 page requests which I'm sure not all are even humans. But occasionally someone reads a post from like a year ago and a reply shows up. But if I wanted to chat with y'all I'd rejoin the IRC or @ y'all in the fedi.
Anyway! That's my current thought process: If I had the time and money what would I do to solve the community hub void that forums, reddits and the like served but how could I do it better?