The anti-marketing aspect of the Gemini network
21 points by cgrinds
21 points by cgrinds
I really like Gemini in concept (and would love to render my blog as a gemini capsule), but the lack of inline links is what kills it for me personally. I make liberal use of inline links in my posts, and I feel like any way of displaying those on a separate line is bound to feel awkward.
With that said, I do try to make sure my blog renders fine on text-based browsers.
Yeah, every time I look into it my two thoughts are: "Man, I'm so fond of this sort of no-nonsense presentation...", immediately followed by "...but I really hate that they went this bare-bones."
I get the idea, Gemtext should be readable as-is without any parsing necessary, but the implementation feels so baby with the bathwater. I really miss basic text formatting (bold, italics, strikethrough) and, as you say, inline links too.
Out of curiosity, I've checked how my own sites would look when converted into Gemtext and the result was less than satisfying. In fairness, I wasn't hand-converting the pages I tested, instead I used a plugin for Pandoc, so I'm sure if you put in the time it can look nicer, but regardless I kept having the impression, that the ideal blog experience is a little more than what Gemini can provide.
I would love to work with folks to create an extended Gemtext that supports inline formatting in a Gemini-native way (focusing on simplicity, ease of implementation, and readability without rendering). The issue is getting the community to catch on without opening the path to countless more extensions.
Sounds very achievable! The Lagrange browser (as an example) will render linked images inline if the user wants to, so this kind of thing could be up to the client to decide.
Such a discussion is already happening but my advice is to Just Do It. Pick a way, write a few documents, see how it works. One issue I had with Gemini (back in the early days) is that people wanted to talk (and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk) about how things should be done without trying anything! And woe be to the one who tried! They would get ignored (at best) or told to shut up, sit down, and let the adults talk (not like I'm still bitter about that).
No inline links is perhaps one of the defining feature of gemtext.
That’s exactly part of the game: without inline text, you need to write very differently. Each link must have a clear purpose. It has a real cost, it must be introduced and really relevant to not interrupt the reading flow.
Inline text is, in fact, lazyness from the writer: I put links everywhere and I let the reader confronted with the dilemma of contiune reading or clicking without really knowing what the link is and if it is really relevant.
People wants Gemini but with inline links, with bold/italics and with at least some style customization. Then stay on the Web. There’s a reason why Gemini was, on purpose, written as non-extendable : just to avoid that.
But, no, you will not be able to just translate your website into a gemini capsule. That would defeat the whole thing.
If you really want to try Gemini, you must first write Gemtext. You must adapt to the constraints. (which is something every writer in history had to do with his own media). Try it. Write a couple of blogposts with the Gemtext constraint (no inline link, no bold/italic, no inline picture). And see by yourself.
It mades me a better writer, for sure. It might not work for you. But you need to really try it by yourself.
I really miss basic text formatting (bold, italics, strikethrough)
Unicode has a s̶o̶m̶e̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶a̶d̶v̶i̶s̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 for you.
I tried that for my Gemini mirror and as I recall, it broke stuff rather badly (both server and clients) For one, you can't paste the text sans formatting. Second, I'm not sure if screen readers (if there are any for Gemini) could deal with that. And third, does it work for languages that don't use the Latin alphabet (I've seen some Gemini pages with Chinese on them).
I'm sure if you put in the time it can look nicer
I doubt it. I mirror my blog (web first, since 1999) to Gemini and I've yet to convert the HTML (how the posts are stored) into Gemtext in a way that doesn't look like garbage. Obviously, the less HTML, the better the result, but in general, it's not easy [1]. The Gopher mirror looks a lot better as just plain text.
[1] And Solderpunk limited lists to only one level---no nested lists! To this day I still don't understand his rational for that decision.
There's a service on Gemini called NewsWaffle that offers access to basically anything from Al Jazeera and The Guardian to Hacker News and Lobsters. Through it I discovered an interesting publication called Low-Tech Magazine. And then there's also ActivityPub software like Tootik, which can federate with WWW instances!