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
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.
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.
Browsers are bigger than operating systems now.
Not only that, there are web pages bigger than operating systems!
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.
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
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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’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.
more of a curiosity than a actually usable web substitute.
I kinda think they locked in the “curiosity” status when they decided not to have inline images. Feels like a step more than most ppl would do without.
sourcehut hosts it free and makes publishing dead simple. You just push a tarball, and Bob’s your mother’s brother.
