See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

It is similar to the old gopher: text files, links, and images form a hypertext optimized for reading. Text is formatted like Markdown - but even simpler.

Clients display text, like an eBook, or images / media.

Servers can run on a PC or Raspberry Pi which needs half a Watt of power. No FAANG companies needed. No expert knowledge needed - not more difficult than running a file sharing client.

I think it is the right thing for defense of democracy and sharing your voice in the digital realm.

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[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What's wrong with http?

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There's varying takes on why folks prefer Gemini:

HTML browsers are too complex. It is virtually impossible to implement a new one. We've got 2½ implementations, i.e. Blink/WebKit and Gecko, and that's it. Yes, you can use Dillo or w3m, links and lynx to view simplistic webpages, but anyone, who actually wants to use the web with these, will quickly run into webpages they cannot view.
With Gemini, you can use tons of clients, some of them even written in Bash, because it's so simple, and you will not run into pages you cannot view.
Burn the web. Some folks hold the opinion that the modern web is beyond saving, because advertisers control many central parts of it. Presumably, these days folks are also glad to be spared from AI-generated garbage. And again, you can create your own webpage that's all smallweb with pure HTML and whatnot, but anyone who actually wants to browse these pages has an easier time finding them on Gemini.
An own community. Of course, using a different communication protocol cuts off communication with most of humanity. But as a result, many folks on Gemini know each other and bother reading blogs that they might not have read on the HTTP side of things.
Well, and through survivorship bias, folks on Gemini tend to be nerds who care about permacomputing and the like, so that also helps with finding folks that have similar interests, even if you might end up reading their gardening blog, due to the aforementioned point.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The first two points have nothing to do with HTTP‽

The last one is just August before Eternal September ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 20 hours ago

Well, HTTP + HTML+JS+CSS. The "World Wide Web", if you will.

[–] breadguy@kbin.earth 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

with gemini, you will quickly run into webpages you can't view as well (ie. all of them)

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Alright yeah, I half-expected as much when I wrote that sentence. Surely someone will post about a webpage they found, or will source something from e.g. Wikipedia. But well, hopefully it still happens less often, or at least there's less of an expectation that you look at linked webpages. 🫠

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think the better comparison (whether that's technically accurate or not) is to HTML + CSS + JS. Which is overly complicated for just small blogs and personal webpages etc. I think that's the "issue" Gemini is trying to solve.

[–] racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Still not an issue. Just throw out all modern web frameworks and stick to content-focused HTML. You can even do plaintext with unclickable links.

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Or if you like a more readable markup with a very thin markdown layer on either the client or server side.

[–] racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 days ago

I think TeX is the right way.

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Have you ever seen HTML without CSS? It's ugly as hell

[–] krash@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago (4 children)

...or is it?

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

yes

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Whoa. An update to the HTML Hell Page!

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I have 2 webpages like this. Calling them webpages is a bit of stretch to be honest. One is a joke and the other is extremely single idea only. I was just experimenting with some stuff, that's all. But they are up and they don't need CSS. :-)

https://thingsiplay.eu.pythonanywhere.com/next_underlords_update : just generate a random date, because the game died and we was waiting ages for an update
https://thingsiplay.eu.pythonanywhere.com/game-random-of-the-week : select a random game title for the selected system (old consoles only, mainly for emulation) and cache it, it will be permanent for this week, idea goes back to a forum I was using and we had a community to play random games and this is a hommage to that

Edit: BTW forgot to mention, you can output text only without HTML. In that case (like in the Random of the Week) you can use it in the terminal like output of a program.

curl https://thingsiplay.eu.pythonanywhere.com/game-random-of-the-week/mame/text

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago

I have a few (internal) web pages like that at work, they do the job but yes they are ugly

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Depends on the client side native styles. With Gemini, those are also needed to be adjusted.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

Depends to what you compare. Many CSS (worse if it uses JavaScript) is ugly and I prefer the native look without CSS. But only if the content works well, which they often don't... And that's ugly design.