flexibeast.space - gemlog - 2021-02-17
The purpose of Gemini, and ease-of-access to geminispace
i haven't been writing stuff for my capsule as much as i'd like, for a variety of reasons. (One of which is that i've been porting the HTML documentation for s6-networking[a] and execline[b] to mdoc(7).) This post is something of an attempt to re-orient myself back towards writing.
In a recent post to the Gemini mailing list, i wrote:
i've encountered people discussing Gemini as something intended to supersede the Web, even though the opening text of gemini.circumlunar.space states:
“Gemini is a new internet protocol which: • Is heavier than gopher • Is lighter than the web • Will not replace either”
and FAQ 1.4 states:
“1.4 ‘Do you really think you can replace the web?’ Not for a minute! Nor does anybody involved with Gemini want to destroy Gopherspace. Gemini is not intended to replace either Gopher or the web, but to co-exist peacefully alongside them as one more option which people can freely choose to use if it suits them.”
That said, in terms of FAQ 1.1:
“You may think of Gemini as ‘the web, stripped right back to its essence’ or as ‘Gopher, souped up and modernised a little’, depending upon your perspective.”
i prefer the latter perspective, as i think the former tends to encourage people to think of Gemini along the lines of, say, HTTP 1.1 and HTML 3.2.
So i was gratified to read the following post, which echoes most of my own sentiments on this topic:
"gemini isn’t meant to do everything"
i also found this proposal interesting:
"a user-friendly interface for the Gemiverse" [c]
i find it encouraging that the Gemini community continues to look for ways to make geminispace easier to access and contribute to.
☙
☙
[a] s6-networking
[b] execline
[c] Favourite sentence: “No Electron, please.” It hurts my head that people do things like create a bookmark manager using an entire Web rendering engine rather than simply creating a GUI for something like buku:
which is what i did with Ebuku: