💾 Archived View for station.martinrue.com › maria › 6b798ff86e58426d9b8445c76cc1546b captured on 2023-12-28 at 17:49:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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what's the obsession with sending and processing data within Gemini boundaries? another discussion on the mailing list. why isn't 1k characters enough and if you need forms and monetisation you can go the clearweb 😔
2 years ago · 👍 marginalia, warpengineer, mntn, figbert, hyperlinkyourheart, smokey
Limitations breed creativity i suppose. Its cool to see what people can do given with the tools at hand. · 2 years ago
Some people really don't want there to be any other protocol involved. It doesn't bother me personally, but I can see why the idea of having a single interface to both create and read content is appealing. · 2 years ago
I think some of us really and truly would like to be able to move off the Web completely, which is leading some of us to try shoehorning Gemini into the sorts of browser-centric workflows we've become acclimated to. · 2 years ago
Let mi join this rather hot discussion :) I would like to propose salt&sugar point of view. Whereas everyone understand that any software or protocol we use should have useful easy-to-use features to be successful (sugar), not everyone understand that it also should be designed to prevent misuse. Wrong, dangerous or distractive use should be restricted (salted). An example is sockets in real world: you just cannot plug cabel wrong! Diet should be balanced. Sugar-only one in case of HTTP(S) ended up to the bloated googlenet.
P.S. Another case is Rust vs C/C++: well sugar&salt balanced Rust quickly became the most loved language (acording to Stack Overflow). · 2 years ago
Limits like this make it easier to write software, but also (intentionally) restrict possible uses of the protocol. Accepting such limitations on philosophical grounds may be a lot to ask when people are accustomed to the level of freedom afforded by modern computing. · 2 years ago
what's the obsession?
Staying within Gemini boundaries (TLS, client certs) makes some use cases a lot simpler because it provides a solution for access control and user authentication. It shouldn't have to be a requirement to have parallel SSH/FTP/web accounts for this purpose. Also, one might want to avoid exposing additional ports to the public internet.
isn't 1k characters enough
Depends on the use case. Much of Geminispace works great with 1024-byte requests, but it arbitrarily rules out services where the client/user would supply larger data (e.g., a certificate or a key, or an image file). · 2 years ago
@ser you can get away from that by inserting a "read more" link, which would in this case be a link to your own capsule, probably. Not ideal, I'll grant that. · 2 years ago
@marginalia I do appreciate minimal HTML, but leading by example doesn't fix massive coordination problems. (See also CO2 emissions.) No matter how many of us try to promote minimal, JS-free websites, I'm probably never going to be able to use a console-based browser over a slow link to view most content on the HTTP internet. · 2 years ago
It does sort of shoehorn Gemini into a Twitter-like space, where comments on social-oriented sites are necessarily brief and -- consequently -- lack depth. You live in sound bites, or you artificially inject a multi-part, threaded workflow. · 2 years ago
@mntn But what's preventing you (or anyone) from producing quality HTML and serving it over HTTP? I don't understand why you seem to think that just because some people use it in silly ways, it can no longer be used in good ways. · 2 years ago
I guess people simply try to replicate their habits without understand clearly the given conditions or without embracing those fully.
A certain degree of interaction like Station or other capsule that let you post a comment is nice, but home banking with Gemini might result as on horror...
Gemini is nice the way it is and really encourage writing content. I am currently writing a book although my spare time is lesser than nothing.
But the simple condition of having a restricted markup and the fact that Gemini is basically WYSIWYG is really helpful and promotes a creative and distractions-free environment. · 2 years ago
@marginalia Unfortunately the HTTP situation is a coordination problem and a tragedy of the commons. "Raising awareness" isn't enough to fix it. If the capability is there, it will be used and abused. · 2 years ago
@mntn It isn't as though HTTP is inherently wasteful. I can only speak for my website, but I don't have a lot of page loads in excess of 25 Kb. If anything, I think gemini can help show us what HTTP and HTML was supposed to be, that is, to demonstrate the power of hypertext, and help bring some of that back to HTTP. · 2 years ago
To me, it makes more sense for Gemini to live alongside other protocols. HTTP has been abused to become a substitute transport like TCP/IP. When did everyone forget that it was possible to use more than one protocol in an application? Browsers used to support FTP as well as HTTP. FTP is lacking, but maybe a successor protocol would fill the need better than a bunch of Dropbox clones... this is less complex, and it would ensure interoperability across services. · 2 years ago
It's like adding lanes to a highway. Traffic inevitably expands to fill it. Keeping the capacity low forces some drivers to find other options, which could be a good thing if you want to keep things small. · 2 years ago
Some of it is surely driven by performative minimalism, but I've also seen a few discussions where people brought up the needs of low bandwidth/small data cap users. The modern web is terrible for them. In a way, the restrictions posed by Gemini ensure that even people on remote islands or sailboats (via satellite) won't be shut out due to the creeping bandwidth needs of "web applications". · 2 years ago
At that point, adherence to the strictures has become its own goal. It doesn't matter what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. It has cooked down to "more strict adherence = better". No thought to why and if. · 2 years ago
Oh, you've decluttered down to only owning 15 things? I started like that, but then I thought, do you *really* need more than 3 things? · 2 years ago
This seems to be a common thing in communities formed around some ideal, aspecially an ascetic one. Oh, you merely gave away all your stuff and moved to the desert? How pious of you, I did all that *and* I only eat once every 136 hours and sleep on a bed of rocks. · 2 years ago