reaching its peak

One can only hope.

I've been hosting a gemini capsule for a few years, but I hardly ever find myself using gemini. It's something I'd like to use more, but I kind of view it as more of a curiosity than a actually usable web substitute.

I fail to understand the point of this.

If the goal is to be able to deliver documents without any JS, cookies, tracking, etc., then why not just deliver documents that way through the web? No one is forcing anyone to put those things on any website.

Honestly, I expect Gemini to remain a niche thing pretty much forever.

It does not offer what a regular user wants: a convenient, interactive, extensible, multipurpose Web. For most, it's incredibly boring and outdated. Even worse that it requires its own browser or translation through the local server.

At the same time, a lot of its advantages are specifically due to low adoption. What makes it more free and people-centric, for example, is exactly that barely anyone knows of its existence. Nothing stops one from infesting it much the same way regular Web is.

What would be curious, though, is the interaction between the concepts of this project and projects like Reticulum. We may need to develop alternative means of communication, including low-bandwith channels like LoRa, and for that, simple text-based sites are perfect.

While gemini is a great project, I personally think a better route would be to create a local or server service that converts and saves existing webpages to markdown, and local apps acting as markdown browsers utilizing it.

With that people could write simple browsers, as well as reduce spying and have static content viewable on all form factors.

Everything that's not static content (like the fediverse) already can have dedicated apps.

It sucks that google changed its chatbot name from bard to gemini and drowned this cool project out in the process. It's a beautiful simple thing, and feels like the internet as it once was and should partially remain.

I loved their note:

Note: This article is about Gemini, the HTTP-like Internet protocol for document browsing, and not the large language model or the cryptocurrency of the same name. Nor it is about astrology.

The idea sounds interesting. I'm not against trying new things, but it seems kinda dead in the water?
For me forums were big part of my Internet history - but it is history. I'm not sure many people would choose to go back...

I recall learning about it around the time i started to learn Linux, when the pandamic first appeared. The introductory text/blog, or whatever it was, really resonated with me. I recall I kept reading and growing more and more excited and thinking I finally found a place on the internet that had people who thought like me, who hated the ad-choked, bot-death, politically-emotional wasteland and reality show the internet became.

I installed a client or three and ...nothing. I couldn't find anything. I didn't know what to look for, I'm not sure there even was a search or a way to know what content there was, beyond curated lists of page titles.

I tried learning how to make my own page and must have gotten confused or distracted and moved on.

I go back and try again every year or so but I think I lack something that helps me get into it more.

Maybe I need another user to befriend, a twin so to speak, hence the name of the protocol. Maybe I need a better internet connection (I'm poor, speed tops out at ~300kb/s, average is ~100kb/s). Maybe I just need another year or two.

Gemini is probably going to go the way of the Hurd sadly, IMO. It is a niche that only privacy enthusiasts and FOSS enthusiasts wish to succeed. The Hurd is doing pretty good for how little people are working on it. If anyone is interested checkout my community, which is centered around the GNU Hurd.

I've checked out Gemini a couple of times and find it a fun project.

In my opinion though, we gain more by participating in the wider web. There are a plethora of small web websites out there - it's only difficult to find them. Blogrolls/blogrings and dedicated search engines like Marginalia help with this.

This also lets everyone have a more granular definition of what's important to them: lack of javascript, minimal page size, lack of styling, full-text RSS feeds, compatibility with text-mode browsers etc. Everyone can pick and choose what they value without having to hash out agreement over the spec.

It's fun. It has a few rough edges I would love to be fixed.

The format would make you think that's perfect for phone browsing, it's just text so ot should adapt easy to small screens. Well, I've found too many capsules that write newlines for formsting text based on a traditional desktop expected screen size. I think there should be more geminiettiquete about not making the format of the page expect any aspect ratio or size.

On the web we have css to fix that and do fancy formats that can adapt everywhere. In gemini there's no css so publishers should avoid trying to aim for a hardcoded expected aspect. As that could break the viewing experience for many users.

Other that that it's quite fun to read some of the little pages out there.

sourcehut hosts it free and makes publishing dead simple. You just push a tarball, and Bob’s your mother’s brother.