💾 Archived View for geminiprotocol.net › news › 2023_07_30.gmi captured on 2024-07-08 at 23:57:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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Section 4 of the FAQ, "Protocol design", has now been expanded and reworked, mostly to try to explain as clearly as possible how various aspects of Gemini's design are in fact the deliberate consequences of leaning hard into some chosen principles. The FAQ as a whole is certainly still not perfect and I expect that I may continue to tweak it in the nearish future, but I don't think there should be any more changes on the same scale as this recent overhaul for quite a while. If anybody would like to attempt updating the existing translations, or starting a new one, I think that work could safely begin now without fear of major disruption.
Whereas the first big FAQ update made the whole document more than three times longer than it used to be, this update has "only" made the FAQ 20% longer. It's gotten very long, I'm well aware. The whole thing is close to 27,000 words. Reading at 225 words per minute on average, which some very brief web research seems to suggest is typical for adult native speakers of English, the whole thing would take two hours. That's a big time commitment, but then, actually reading the entire thing will leave somebody with a breadth of understanding of the protocol and things related to it which, previously, could only possibly be acquired by extensively studying the mailing list archives, which would take an awful lot longer and have a much lower signal to noise ratio. So this large FAQ does, in fact, represent substantial progress.
Few people are likely to want or need to read the entire thing, anyway. At Sloum's suggestion, I have also made each section of the FAQ available as a standalone document. There are links at the start of the full FAQ document to the individual sections. Each section ends with links to the previous and following sections, as well as the full document. I think it will be very useful to be able to link people to specific sections for different purposes. The "Introduction and overview" section ought to take 15-20 minutes to read, which is not unreasonable, especially as it is written in fairly casual, conversation style. The "Protocol design" section will take a little more than half an hour, but shouldn't take as much as three quarters of an hour. Most Gemini users will never need to read that, but it's essential reading for, say, anybody who wants to write a long and detailed article providing their "take" on the protocol without it coming across as uninformed, and I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect people to invest 30-40 minutes in research before writing something like that.
As before, feedback on these changes and suggestions for improvements are welcome!