The modern web is awesome. The modern web is also awful.
Ads, data collection, AI slop, algorithms. For every useful YouTube video, there's hundreds from wannabe content creators, polluting the training pool for a future version generated by an AI regurgitating garbage. All misinformed by rage-bait, designed to increase engagement at the expensive of civilization.
Maybe it's rose-colored glasses, but the tint is shared by many of us who seem to remember a time where the web was an equalizer and democratizer. Good information from reliable sources was readily identified, while user-created content was clearly delineated and delightful in its wacky creativeness.
The limited palette provided by early web tech provided limited real-estate for advertising, prevented tracking, and constrained algorithmic manipulation. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't the swamp we have now.
The Gemini protocol is a reboot. Drawing from the Gopher protocol in its simplicity and the early web in its functionality, Gemini provides a simple, secure mechanism for hosting and fetching content, with deliberately limited markup, design and server-side control. Ultimately, the rendering is up to the client.
As a modern protocol, it does depend on newer TLS (unlike Gopher, which was in the clear) which ratchets up the requirements for client implementation. But once a secure channel is established, the actual communication is simple. Since implementations are open-source, it was easy for an AI to learn from, and implement, a very basic webOS implementation. Nizovn's OpenSSL package provides the necessary libraries for security, bypassing the ancient SSL stack in webOS. More on the significance of this solution in the Christmas thread.
Heavily based on Lagrange, this app is bare bones: basic navigation and bookmark management. Discovering the Geminiverse might be best done on a full computer. But once you have some Capsules you want to follow, you can do so on your TouchPad.
Grab the app and learn more about Gemini in the App Museum, but make sure you have nizovn's OpenSSL package installed first.
