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In which I slag on the Gemini mentions proposal for half an hour

Gemini mention, an ongoing discussion

I don’t wanna implement mentions. It’s breaking something that already worked. We already had aggregators or email or just the faith that people are reading their friends’ capsules (or just skimming it, when it comes to firehoses like mine).

This is what’s been so teeth-pulling about Gemini. Always getting more homework dumped in our laps. Specs upon specs upon specs for their own sake. Not into it. I’ve said many times that Gemini is enworsening, not ameliorating, the reckless, infinite scope of web browsers. We were drowning in specs so please don’t thrown us an anchor made of even more specs to save us. We’ll only drown even more.

The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers

I had Atom and was pretty happy with that and people were like “why don’t you implement Gemini too” and I did and it was a bee and a half because back then almost no Gemini server supported different languages for different pages without serious hoops and then gmisub and then broken redirects and then dir traversal and then this and then that and then the other and after a while it’s all hacking and no writing.

I don’t wanna run CGI.

I think the “no actually /.well-known was meant to be capsule-root–relative not domain-root–relative” thing goes against everything that .well-known was ever meant to do, not to mention that in the world of URIs there’s no such thing as “capsule root”–relative; there’s no distinguishing that from any other path.

I also don’t wanna add yet another contact vector. I’m happy with email.

I really, really don’t wanna implement this and that means either there’s a non-zero amount of grumpy grognards who don’t wanna do it (in which case you’re gonna have to use the other methods anyway, like Cosmos), so there’s no point in doing it, or I’m gonna get dragged kicking and screaming into doing it which I really hope does not happen.

I think bacardi55 is cool and I haven’t wanted to say anything about the project out of the “if you can’t say anything nice…” principle but then it seemed as if it were picking up steam and getting implemented.

Follow-ups:

Conman wondered why I even continue with Gemini.

I answered that a while ago in this essay.

But that was assuming that “continue with Gemini” didn’t have to mean doing a bunch of programming and hacking. It’s supposed to be simple.

Also “The street finds its own uses for things” is such a non sequitur when the criticism is “I don’t wanna implement this”. I’m sure y’all MacGyvers can turn a can opener into a trombone tuner, that’s not my complaint. My complaint is that I don’t wanna make a can opener for you. We have a perfectly good trombone tuner at home, but even if we hadn’t, I don’t wanna make can openers. I don’t wanna drop everything to make can openers on some sorta nerd snipe command.