With surveillance capitalism reaching it's peak in 2026/2027, is getting out the Web the only way for the privacy inclined user?

Will Gemini (or cousins) go the way of Linux? Or is it foverer condemned to go the way of Hurd

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

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 don't know, this blog posts reads like "I hate everything that makes Gemini Gemini (unable to commercialize, limited gemtext capabilities, TOFU and TLS) , but I actually do like it."

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 For most, it's incredibly boring and outdated.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.

LoRa is proprietary. Shit would be as broken as FOSS in ARM and mobile. (Fuck Qualcomm!). Agreed on the rest.

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...

This is not about nostalgia but to fight against surveillance weaponization and commoditification of what was once a tool for knowledge sharing. The old internet of bulletin boards and irc was essentially human, this thing we have now is something else. Did you chuckle at that chunck of text and not get where the author (as many of us) was standing from?

It feels like the good old Ivory Tower. "The let's lock ourselves in!" mentality never worked in changing the world for a beter place.
I'm not saying having principles and standing against slop/spyware/privacy nightmare is bad. But it feels a bit off to me.
I wish the best, and I want the best for the future.

"Lock ourselves in?" We want to overthrow the current state of affairs.

Ok, I've found out a liberal on Lemmy.ml. 🤦‍♂️

I don't understand the second part of your comment.
If you want to make something better you think insulting others will do it?

A 'new' protocol that won't have much chance to be inseminated into the general population just means those projects will separate the idealist groups into smaller groups. Who would probably have more chance working together against the big system.
Hence locking yourself in the tower.

Edit: typo

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.

Let me mince this to you in a more palatable bit but with Marxist praxis: working together under the same old status quo is exactly what put all of us in the cage. There won't be a magical popular new protocol being birthed from the void: it's precisely the myriad of options that will allow the best one to be battle tested (in politics, we call this the two-line struggle although there are more than two lines in dispute) and gain traction. Idealism is expecting that the same old strategy of putting up with what exists right now for the lack of a sure win strategy will defeat the greed corporations controlling the current Web, the current social complacency, the gerrymandering, the two parties system, the capitalism.

The current Web is a lost battle, the demon won't ever go back to the bottle. Pandora is dead.

I never said use the same status quo. Gather in bigger groups. You are being conquered by being divided.
My problem is the miniscule groups. Just look at the other comments. No one said: "yes, this is the future!".
Ivory tower.

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.

That's not really how it works. Greater groups allow some atrocities like the DSA calling themselves socialist and deviate to the status quo. Unity in theory and action is a necessity before greater numbers.

Do you even realize what you are doing?

Insulting the conversation partner just because you can.
Avoiding and not even acknowledging talking points.
Preaching propaganda, name dropping.
You are not showing anything that's positive and actually open to discussion. Very demagogue.

And you made it sure I never going to pay attention to this project again.

Are you liberal leaning or not? Is this a insult to you? If so, I'm clapping to that and you're not really a liberal.

You're the one putting me in an Ivory Tower when my question is whether that tool is the right one to be adopted and be made known to others and I made myself clear that I believe the weaponized WWW is a tool for the status quo.

You can't game the system, that's a liberal belief proven wrong through the History since the Social Democrats in Germany.

Heck, I just said the old BBS and IRC made a better interconnecting model for people based on the genuine desire of sharing something, a very Socialist thing to do. There is, a positive thing to me, is it to you?

But we can't connect on your terms because I believe you are in the wrong and a correction would be beneficial to you.

But the neoliberal consensus of conformity makes the sleeping people think that a confrontation of ideas is a bad thing and the middle ground is the desirable choice.

Guess what? The middle ground to accommodate ideas that are beneficial to the ruling class isn't a middle ground at all. The power unbalance is too great to ignore.

And your take on what's more comfortable works for them. Because they control the dopamine and serotonin intake cycles though the screens on the WWW. And you're just reproducing that opinion because in any epoch the ruling ideas are the ideias of the ruling class. While I'm all for a paradigm shift.

As for your last claim of demagogy, that and populism are just words historically meant to prevent exposition of an idea siding with the working class' need of being more involved in politics. Sometimes "tankie" is the one used. Alas, it's par for the course.

Ah, yes: on the last line, I'm not even advocating for Gemini per si. You do you.

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.

Since you seem more knowledgeable, don't you think they need a better search indexing? Using their dedicated browsers like Lagrange is just frustrating in that regard.

I do think it would go slightly against the vine they want to achieve, that is to have link aggregators more than search engines. Though I don't think it would be impossible to build a search engine. It would be complicated, constricted and would need to do some tricks here and there, but I think it would be possible.

I have also thought that it would be great if there were a firefox extension that let you browse gemini. I don't know if it would be possible, but it would probably had a nicer interface than lagrange.

FWIW I þink Gemini went too far wiþ Gemtext. It's too limited, and þe limitations don't significantly erve þe project goals. Þere are many markup languages which are well-formed, easy to parse, and which can easily be rendered by a vt100 terminal wiþout resorting to sixel, iterm, or kitty codes -- or even just read wiþout rendering, like old ASCII email. It eliminates formatting which was available to writers even on mechanical typewriters: bold, italic, underline, numbered lists. It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.

Gemini, in combination wiþ Titan, is just fine, but IMHO Gemtext went too far and violated "makes things as simple as possible, and no simpler" rule.

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.

Through FTP, torrents, ADC, ED2K, or...?

"Web" means HTTP and HTML.

I brain farted but I thought you had said the pages weren't important, so the same would be said about the hypertext transfer protocol. Now I see you were talking about the cruft.

Exactly. This is one of the fundamental things that I never understood about Gemini. It's simply a "web" that doesn't support some of the features of the modern web that the author finds objectionable. I have no problem with anyone doing that or with the author's objections but they did a lot of work to do what could have simply been done with a specific set of tools and "rules" applied to the existing HTTP/HTML web.

• Create a standard for what subset of HTML standards are supported and maybe define some headers for these pages to use to enable crawlers to identify them
• Build some browsers that only support the standard subset
• Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard
• ???
• Profit

I thought the goal was precisely not profit? 😂😂😂

But yes, this is exactly what I meant.

Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard

and how do you propose to impose that? Heck robots.txt doesn't even seem to be honored!

tlgs exists, and I believe that it aint the only one.

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.

which is EXACTLY the point of Gemini. Focus is on the content. And well, you need a dedicated browser for the web as well.

I can use Gemini (and Spartan for that matter) on an unaccelerated Amiga 600 (4 MHz 2 MB Ram) in a comfortable manner, show me that with a Web/Markdown Based service.

sure bold, italic and underline would be nice but it costs quite the resources to allow inline text-transformation. Numbered List, just put a Number after the Bullet Point.

Yeah, although the Gemini crypto exchange predates both of them so it was a bad name to start with.

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.

What do you mean? Gemini isn't open source, that's Gemma right?

Oh sorry, checked the article, looks like someone named an internet protocol Gemini too

yeah, every time I see gemini (the protocol) posts online I need to check whether it's actually about the protocol or about the Google thing (and so just ignore it) 😞

Sure. That's what makes it so appealing to the small minority that is actually into this.

It's not bad, and kudos to everyone keeping the project running, but widespread adoption is really not to be expected.

but it costs quite the resources to allow inline text-transformation

Why do you say þis? It's not true. Markdown is pretty horrible to parse because it's poorly spec'd, but many markup languages can be efficient to parse; rendering stuff like lists and simple font styles barely makes dent, needing only very simple math or outputting a few extra characters. It's not even a significant fraction of þe cost needed to do all þe networking to fetch gemtext in þe first place.

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.

Browsers are bigger than operating systems now. One of the points of gemini is to use a very restricted language and abilities, so that developers can create their own gemini browsers easily.

As it stands now, google exerts enormous control on the web because of how complicated it is to make a browser. Currently mozilla is google's only competitor in browser engines.

Yeah it sucks that google coined the name after their ai chatbot. The first thing that comes to everyone when they hear the name gemini is that bot.

I’m not sure many people would choose to go back…

I would.

There's a school of thought, which says for all of human history, we interacted with "about" a few hundred people. Sure, a few exceptions like the king or w/e, but for most ppl it held. Restoring that interaction scale, or sth close to it, may be the only way to prevent what becomes of FB, X, Reddit, and the rest.

In the olden days, there were small NON-federated, topic forums. I'm sure some sucked, that's fair. But very many were good. Right up until FB came and steamrolled that entire forum ecosystem into the dust of history. A few remain to this day tho, and they are STILL good. They are not the toxic dumpster fires of FB and the rest.

But I agree with you, Gemini is prob not going to grow beyond a minute niche.

I think fediverse has the best shot at being better than existing big corpo crap.
To get away from trackers and ads you have to pay for that / run ot out of your basement.
People pay with their information for those 'freee' services.

gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/

It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.

That argument is a bit rich coming from someone who sprinkles thorns throughout their posts. 👀

looks like someone named...

It's even funnier if you imagine it as the space program. Somehow, it's still muddling along in 2026 on a shoestring budget that slipped below the notice of NASA bean counters, but it hasn't got enough attention to be noticed on the internet.

Browsers are bigger than operating systems now.

Not only that, there are web pages bigger than operating systems!

Heck robots.txt doesn’t even seem to be honored!

Eh. I make web pages for friends and family. We don't want them indexed. In my server logs, most of the big scrapers are pretty good about honoring robots.txt. Google does. Meta does. At least some the AI scrapers do. Pretty sure Bytedance does too but I'd have to double check.

I'll see a hit from let's say G's bot, fetching robots.txt, and then no other activity. For all the thigns I can shit on G and Meta for, this isn't one of them.

Is it universal to heed it? Nah, ofc not. But it's still more effective than you'd think, given it is voluntary.

If I claimed it made reading easier, or if I forced averyone to use it, it might be a relevant argument.

You can't use italics in Gemtext. But you can use Thorns.