Some Gemini Myths

I've been around for a while, and I've seen it before. A new thing comes out, and all kinds of foolish claims are made to support its supposed benefits. I remember how scrypt currency was going to kill bitcoin because you supposedly could not build special hardware. Or 'unstoppable' etherium contracts that were quickly stopped when someone was going to lose money.

I love Gemini for its minimalism (even though the protocol and markup language are arbitrary and kind of stupid). Obviously, it hit the spot for a lot of us. But there are some silly ideas being tossed about as truths, which should be examined.

The reason to re-examine some premises critically is because if we don't, we would be relying on fallacies and one day will wake up and Gemini as we know it will have been transformed into something we hate.

Gemini is resistant to commercializing

Yea, right. The only reason it's not getting commercialized is because it is litterally a mouse fart in the atmosphere - not worth even thinking about for anyone who wants to be paid a minimum wage. As soon as there is real money to be made, it will be quickly commercialized

It may never come, but if enough people like Gemini, we need to be prepared for it. We need to organize and build technology that will allow us to ban sites that are abusive, distribute lists of certificates to blacklist, etc.

Most importantly we need to be vocal in our opposition to commericalization, data collection, fingerprinting, logging, and other abuses.

Gemini protocol cannot be changed

Ridiculous. Any protocol can be changed when the majority demands that it be changed. Any protocol can be changed when a loud minority makes enough of a stink. A few wealthy people can change anything. Bitcoin and ethereum were altered when it was convenient. It's trivial to fork an open-source project and make a change.

The painful truth is that psychopaths are really good at winning popularity contests. They will convince you that without this change Gemini is doomed, and you will be so convinced that you will shout me down as a traitor. I've had that happen to me.

You can make a browser in a weekend

You can't do anything in a weekend. You should go out and ride a bike or go to the beach instead of mucking around with stuff you can't understand (such as TLS).

Well, you can make a crappy text client that just dumps a page. You can't make anything worth using - a real browser that helps you organize your bookmarks, display things nicely, or do cut and paste reasonably.

The reason I can say that is because no one has built a decent GUI client that looks good and manages bookmarks well - as of yet. LeGrange is close, but you can't drag and drop links, and bookmarks are hard to use. Ariane on android is beautiful, but eats the first letter of #HEADINGS and again bookmark management is crap. It's been a few weekends.

Gemtext gmi is small and logical

It's small but absurdly illogical. There are five possible elements: Headers, quotes, links, bullets, and preformatted-text. Each is flagged in an entirely inconsistent way. Headers have one, two, or three # marks, but no space after. Bullets start with a * and must have a space after. Pre-formatted text has three backquotes acting as a global mode or toggle! Links have a two-character mark => which may have a whitespace (that is a space or a tab) following it.

If you wanted to be more consistent than this, you could roll a die to decide how to mark line types. At least two would likely use the same way. You could not possibly be less consistent than Gemini as it stands. It is a joke, really.

People love gmi because it lacks this or that

Be it bold type, underline, or links that don't need their own line - people do not love gemini because of that. You can always make a client that does not display **bold** or _underline_, if you prefer looking at **this** instead -- because many people will write that regardless of how it's displayed.

It's really up to the user to decide how they want things displayed. The protocol should not even discuss the menaning of *words* _like_ <=this=>.

Some browsers will let you display images inline, when so instructed. It does not take away from the Gemini experience.

No one will quit Gemini because <=links are inlined=> into main text. It does not make text more readable to have a paragraph be broken because of a link. It does not make text more readable because you have to refer to a reference at the bottom of the page using some weird unicode glyph that cannot be parsed as a number. These are foolish ideas.

People do love Gemini because it's doesn't have javascript, layers of CSS, cross-links to hostile tracking sites, pixels used for tracking, etc.

We must make sure that nothing is shoved down our throat without at least asking (or not at all). Arguing about bold text is not worth it.