Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web's is in a renaissance. On the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology, and how these protocols meet you where you are, whether you're on a machine from 2005 or just tired of Chrome's monoculture.
i always hated the web as a programmer. i couldn’t put my finger on it as a junior Android dev. now i’m a cloud engineer doing federated GraphQL at a huge corporation, and i know exactly why i hate it. HTTP sucks. HTML sucks. CSS sucks. JavaScript sucks. the web is jank and designed to leak information about you. you have to be pretty obtuse to say that any website operates as smoothly and seamlessly as any decent native app, unless it’s the “This is a Fucking Website” design with no modern features or JavaScript. sure, there’s a mountain of RFCs around these protocols, but not even Chromium follows them all to the letter. documentation has always been a desperate way to enforce protocols. i’ve always been interested in alternative protocols, but this has finally inspired me to give Gemini a go in my off time.
but i’ve been more interested in data passing than application distribution (ie HTML/CSS/JS). i’m curious to see what these protocols offer beyond yet another markup format. maybe a better object format than friggin JSON? 🙏
i always hated the web as a programmer. i couldn’t put my finger on it as a junior Android dev. now i’m a cloud engineer doing federated GraphQL at a huge corporation, and i know exactly why i hate it. HTTP sucks. HTML sucks. CSS sucks. JavaScript sucks. the web is jank and designed to leak information about you. you have to be pretty obtuse to say that any website operates as smoothly and seamlessly as any decent native app, unless it’s the “This is a Fucking Website” design with no modern features or JavaScript. sure, there’s a mountain of RFCs around these protocols, but not even Chromium follows them all to the letter. documentation has always been a desperate way to enforce protocols. i’ve always been interested in alternative protocols, but this has finally inspired me to give Gemini a go in my off time.
but i’ve been more interested in data passing than application distribution (ie HTML/CSS/JS). i’m curious to see what these protocols offer beyond yet another markup format. maybe a better object format than friggin JSON? 🙏