The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it’s barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.
Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It’s self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.
Of course, you’ll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.
You can just scrap the protocol and serve plaintext, or with just basic html tags like bold , links etc if you want to, works with any navigator.
What is the benefit of using a special navigator?
I’m asking because I think the idea kind of neat, and I’m working on something similar.
Because it was designed on purpose to not even have the ability to be enshittified. No scripting engine, on purpose – no popup ads. No cookies, no tracking.
Things that were originally thought as good things to add to the browser in retrospect have been abused so much, it’s better to not have them available for mis-use.
The issue is the structures motivating companies to enshittify. Not the technology. Blame late stage capitalism not JavaScript.
I will never NOT blame JavaScript for ANYTHING
You know JavaScript allows websites to be more local first, right? Apps that would otherwise require a server to handle a lot of the rendering logic. Sure, you can wish we had a front-end scripting language other than JavaScript, but modern JavaScript is pretty good actually. There’s been a ton of work by browsers to optimize performance, and TypeScript has made shipping JavaScript with confidence much easier. Facebook has made it possible with Hermes to ship bite code pre-compiled JavaScript. The entire JavaScript tool chain is currently being rewritten to Rust and Go for massive speed increases. I’ve been writing JavaScript for a decade, and it used to suck. It’s a wonderful time to write JavaScript.
I know what JavaScript is.
I’m saying any language could perform the same function.
My issue is with the design of the language and its gargbage feature set.
What would you change about JavaScript? Like specific language features you don’t like. Not general statements.
Types?
Edit:
For clarity, consider all the shit an actual real production scenario demands of layering on library after library and framework after fucking framework to make it usable.
Nobody even USES “JavaScript”, they use like 7 layers to try and turn it into a production ready environment.
Why.
Because JavaScript sucks.
Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of what other languages come with out of the box.
Try to learn it and you’ll see!
At least if you know programming beforehand.
I’m pretty interested in Gemini but the learning curve to self-host is pretty steep. Not sure why someone can’t just create a docker image for those of us who believe in self-hosting but haven’t the skills (yet) to CLI .
Agate is a popular and actively maintained server that only serves static files, and it hosts images on ghcr.io. It’s a pretty short Dockerfile.
