Blog now Mirrored on Gemini! Also other details!
This should be the first blog that's mirrored on both this website and on my Gemini Capsule. I have also written a short script so I can do minilogs whenever I feel like it as well. The former, the blog, will be for more focused and well written up content- usually with an aim of describing or explaining something or venting very heavily about some piece of trash.
As for the other details? I'm going to be supporting the Gemini project much more. Gopher had its issues, and as much as I wanted to support it, it had critical issues in its conception. Namely the way it tried to link files together without MIME types. Gemini seems to me a reimagining of Gopher in a modern way that's suitable for use by almost everyone. I will talk now about what it offers, and what it doesn't.
What it offers
Gemini is basically the web had it not taken some irredeemable mistakes and become a commerce platform rather than an information platform. I will refer to the Gemini and Gopher spaces as the small web and the HTTP web as the big web for the remainder of this article. In the big web, invasive Javascripting is more than a standard. It's an expectation, and this is not good quite simply as it's a huge invasion of privacy, and quite often supports dark patterns(anti-patterns?) that support commerce. I have nothing against commerce, it's an important requirement for a functioning society and civilisation, but the effects of commerce and information, as well as the utility of psychology in order to manipulate people has led us to the current situation.
It's also a problem that a person cannot sit and write a web browser. I will freely challenge anyone reading this post to create their own web browser that meets a good amount of the standards that the W3C set out. However, a Gopher or Gemini browser is much easier due to it being a text-based protocol. This means it is relatively information dense. The only structuring required, is textual structure. It also has support for UTF-8, meaning that foreign, non-English speaking countries can use it without too much issue. Additionally, this means it is also more accessible than the modern web, as it can be used with screen readers(relatively trivial to implement for pure text. The hard part is shifted from parsing to the phonetics).
Any BASTARD who will cry about multimedia content being lost doesn't see their application in psychology. Quite simply, it's well employed and well known that the appearance of things can be used to manipulate people into behaving in certain ways, and this appearance is facilitated by multimedia content. Examples include, but are not limited to, colour theory with button colours, design theory with buttons(button they want you to press looks like one. Button they don't want you to press doesn't look like one), default opt-in to emails, and so on. You can easily keep listing off more of these dark patterns for manipulating people. I won't bore you with the details.
Interaction isn't lost. CGI is offered, just as it is with HTTP. There's not much to say here, other than the lunacy that is how nobody remembers what CGI is... Sometimes it depresses me greatly how little people remember of their past.
It is also designed to be simple. Simply elegant.
And for the Crypto-Crazed, it uses SSL like HTTPS, except these are self-signed certificates, and there is a good argument for self-signed certificates. I won't go into why it's a good thing or a bad thing, as there's arguments either way, but it's a net positive it uses SSL by default instead of HTTP which doesn't. The real discussion here is about certificate authorities versus self-signed certificates.
Did I mention it's low-network cost, incredibly easy to set up, incredibly easy to maintain, and incredibly easy to browse? I probably didn't, but these factors all add up. If you want to try it in a relatively Neocities-style way, look at the site https://gemlog.blue.
What it doesn't offer
Javascripting. Tracking. Privacy invasion. Automatic opt-in to view multimedia content. Psychological manipulation through appreciable abuse of CSS.
The modern web is trash. Put it in the bin and get some help.