💾 Archived View for thelambdalab.xyz › phlog › 2021-10-07-Gemini-roots.txt captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:54:09.
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Gemini Roots ------------ It's really great to see Gemini mentioned and noticed outside of the pubnix/tildeverse/gopherspace/circumlunar communities. It comes up on Hacker News and lobste.rs quite frequently these days, I've seen it mentioned on Hackaday too. Of course whenever it comes up, comments overflow with enthusiasm and skepticism in +/- equal measure. This is natural and good. What frustrates me however is the number of negative comments and blog posts that seem to base their criticism of Gemini's perceived limitations on the mistaken assumption that Gemini aims to provide a stripped-down web experience. From this perspective, the opposition to inline links and images seems a bit puerile and contrived. What's lacking here is an understanding of Gemini's development context: it was a project designed and driven by people interested in a cleaner and slightly more modern Gopher, not a stripped-down WWW. [1] These people were/are already happily using Gopher heavily but were inspired to play with improvements to some of the more antiquated aspects of it. It's a very simple fact, but often overlooked and, I think, very important in order to understand precisely which group of people Gemini aims to satisfy. Context is everything. --- [1] The official FAQ supports both interpretations, but does say that the "souped-up" Gopher interpretation is "probably more accurate." gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi