A maxim for anyone writing a web page in the mid 1990s was that it was good practice to bring the whole thing (including graphics) in at around 30 kB in size. It was a time when the protocol still had some pretence of efficient information delivery, when information was self-published, before huge corporations brought everything under their umbrellas.
Recently, this idea of the small web has been experiencing something of a quiet comeback. [Serge Zaitsev]’s essay takes us back to a time before the Internet as we know it was born, and reminds us of a few protocols that have fallen by the wayside. Finger or Gopher, both things we remember from our student days, but neither of which was a match for the browser.
All is not lost though, because the Gemini protocol is a more modern take on minimalist Internet information sharing. It’s something like the web, but intentionally without the layer upon layer of extraneous stuff, and it’s been slowly gathering some steam. Every time we look at its software list it becomes more extensive, and we live in hope that it might catch on for use with internet-connected microcontroller-based computing. The essay is a reminder that the internet doesn’t have to be the web, and doesn’t have to be bloated either.
And what about guppy:, nex:, spartan:, text: and even ftp:’s sis fsp:?
Ok, the last one really seems forgotten…
…and I’ll not even mention Hyper-g now!
The worst thing in the nets currently are the broken browsers. Has everyone forgotten what web and browsers were meant to be?
A diverse set of protocols and document formats to be accesses via one frontend: The browser.
Big-$$$ killed diversity and unluckily the smolweb crowd answers with separatism instead of rebuilding diversity.
Both are f-ing wrong!
BRING BACK DIVERSITY!
I assume you mean what the *internet* was supposed to be, not the web – the web refers specifically to the WWW that runs off of HTTP(S).
No. The web once was defined as what is united in your browser and early browsers were not HTTP only.
That may have been your personal definition but for everybody else the “web” was the WorldWideWeb.
The user did not care thru which protocol something was transported. Everything that was clickable in the browser was part of the web and back then it definitely was more than only HTTP links!
I was there. In space and time.
That may have been your personal definition for what “web” meant, but for everybody else it was a shortened version of WorldWideWeb.
Get off my lawn
(replying to your later comment)
I was there too. I was at at university in 1993 at the start of the WorldWideWeb and I remember how I used to browse gopher sites a lot more when I was looking for certain information, which happened to be the subject of growing weed.
If anybody referred to gopher sites as the web, that was only through ignorance as it was clearly a different thing with a much more linear navigation.
Separatism works. You don’t beat the corpo trashweb by letting it sit side-by-side with good content. Kick it out.
This. The point of gemini and its space is that it’s designed to enforce simplicity. Sure, you can have a simple https website, but navigating through that web doesn’t guarantee you’ll stay on simple websites, does it? In gemini, it does, by design.
You blame browsers of the bad state of the internet.
My opinion is that the reason lies in the company leaders, who do not understand anything about the technology and who are not interested in the customers. Only the money talks in those tables.
They give the project and tight time table to a secundary boss, who hires some programmers to work: “make a netsite”.
The programmers are not told what the pagea are used for and who are the customers the pages should serve. So they build page after page of lorem ipsus, because they are paid of quantity of pages, not usefullness. A lot of tech finesses, fonts, special libraries, subfunctions, colors, pictures and videos without any use. “Message contains no information”. No feedback from the customer is asked and if some comes, it dies in the waste basket of the secondary boss.
Been there, seen that as a secondary boss, programmer and customer.
Nowadays, if you try to find some tech documentation, you get only page after page of advertisement.
The internet mignt not be dead, but it is already buried in shit.
Wait, there are options for feedback on sites nowadays???
I have to search OTHER sites just to find the customer service contact for the site in ACTUALLY ON…
It’s readily apparent they don’t care what their users, oh sorry customeeeers, have to say…
I agree that returning to a simpler internet makes great sense socially.
However, having a computer sitting available on this internet costs electricity which at this time also costs money unless you have some source of free electricity. I know I don’t.
Thus the reason the ugly internet we see today was born. Someone needs to finance this service. It doesn’t need to be corporate big wigs that own everything and squeeze people for every last drop of money they can get.
If people cared about the content enough to donate that works to. However, someone still needs to pay the bills or the lights get turned off.
And that is what happened to all the other protocols and every protocol that can’t pay for itself unless it doesn’t cost anything to keep running.
You have some of it right but there were many of us back in the day willing to foot our share plus many of those protocols accessed government or institutional servers for universities (some still accessible) many of us also ran bulletin boards abs connected them to usenet to allow news readers and messaging. Sometimes simpler is better. Although I do much prefer the current graphics capabilities along with video capabilities that were not present in the 80’s. Abs what did become available over the years to a long time to become of the quality we expect when we try to access our photos or watch a movie online.
Webdev builds nice fast lightweight site for company
Company is happy
Customers are happy
Company hires marketing consultant
Marketing consultant requests bloating the site with anti-customer patterns, tracking, modal ads, etc
Site is bloat and slow
Customers spend more, but not happy
Company eventually less happy. Blames current webdev, fires them and hires new one.
Restart cycle
Bill Hicks was completely correct about people who work in marketing.
+1
+2
Are you sure the customers are happy in the beginning ?
Have you ever been in a project, where customers are asked anything ?
It works so that after the pages have been built, the marketing specialists make analyse of the sales and based i that analysis they decide if the product is good and if the netsite is good..
Lets see:
1. There is no 14″ shoes in a shop
2. Customer needs, but does not find 14″ shoes
3. Customer does not buy 14″ shoea, because tthere is none
4. Analyse shows no 14″ shoes are sold
5. Company decides there is no interest in 14″ shoea
6. No 14″ shoes are produced
7. Customer buys duct tape to fix his old boots.
8. Market analyse shows increase in duct tape sales
9. Duct tape salesmen get rise in their salary.
In one sentence:
Injustice because of human stupidity!
This is how to world roll and won’t change anytime soon.
The problem is that we are viewed as and assume the role of customers. That is not how it was originally. We were once just ‘users’ of a diverse network that no one controlled. I propose we start our own vpn, subnet that no corporation controls and just go back to being users and not customers to be poached.
“Every time we look at its software list it becomes more extensive…”
By any other name, a rose is still a rose.
B^)
If you’ve ever been on Freenet, it really takes you right back to the 90s… Or, at least it did, the last time I took a look around, which was at least 5 years ago. So maybe things have changed.
Man, I haven’t thought about GOPHER since about 1995…
Goldie, the mascot of the Minnesota Golden Gophers is a common sight in these parts.
B^)
HotMetal 6.0 Pro successfully copied from optical disk to flash driver using $95 Lenovo N4020 laptop.
Installed on Lenovo $129 N5030 4+0 laptop. Works!
BlueGrifon upgrade of HotMetal ? On steroids?
i don’t get it. if you want to make text-only web pages, html and http are fine. we don’t have a problem of not having good protocols to share text-only content.
I think the idea is to put up a wall to stop the corporate internet from leaking in. Can’t link to amazon/steam/reddit/etc. if they’re on a completely different protocol.
It’s easy to link from eg some http site to an FTP site. Why would different protocols make linking harder?
You can probably even include pictures delivered via FTP in your http delivered website?
(I don’t know about the new protocol, and whether it’s deliberately broken this way?)
Idea behind Gemini as protocol is more simple specification and baked in TLS than http. You can serve any content over it.
Most of the content that are served over Gemini are in gemtext format which is like markdown but more stricter and restricted.
Except that’s the entire point of the “scheme” segment in a URL: to specify the protocol used by the link, thereby enabling links to completely different protocols…
Let’s take back the internet. Gopher and Usenet for the win.
I second this notion of a simpler, cleaner and more information focused web.
But also as shown even here in the comments, I think the way there is not one of a technological solution.
Rather more of a social change, where information and integrity is valued higher. Understanding for it’s own sake.
But I guess until then an alternative driven by community is a nice change, and I’d love to be invited.
You’re invited! https://geminiprotocol.net/ has a link with browsers. Get one installed and poke around. Amfora is a good command line browser, or deedum for Android, or LaGrange for Windows.
Want to serve content? Easiest way I know is to sign up for a free account at SDF.org (ok, you may have to pay $2). This public access unix has shell-based gemini browsers and your account can host gemini pages for free: https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=gemini_site_setup_and_hosting_features
“Finger or Gopher, both things we remember from our student days, but neither of which was a match for the browser.”
You sure you meant to include finger there? Because a web browser can’t tell me who is logged into a local or remote server at all, so finger is technically more than a match for one.
Back in the day my .finger consisted of “Right back at ya!” I often wondered if the “poke” feature on Facebook was derived from finger.
Death to Mosaic, it started the end of the internet where you had to learn something first to use it.
Yeah, the way Gemini evolved certainly does NOT build any sort of confidence: “Much of the [Gemini] development happened on the Gemini mailing list until the list disappeared at the end of 2021 due to a hardware issue.”[1][2] The only Gemini “Speculative Specification” I can find is from 30-January-2022.[3] Ironically – coming full-circle, according to Veronica 2 there is (somewhat newer?) Gemini Documentation served via Gopher.[4]
* References [all links worked for me at post-time in Firefox mainstream v121.0 (64-bit)]:
1. Gemini (protocol) – History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)#History
2. Gemini Info Page
https://web.archive.org/web/20211020132800/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/listinfo/gemini
3. Project Gemini – Speculative Specification – v0.16.1, January 30th 2022
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
4. Project Gemini [on Gopher]. FAQ last updated: 2023-09-02.
gopher://geminiprotocol.net/