fuck the web, embrace the internet
weechat
[US]
Well, HTTP's got its place, even if it's not perfect, and the whole ‘web' thing wasn't just a protocol or anything; it was a structure, a way to make sense of what we now call “the internet.”
That said, in my experience, NNTP and Gopher worked well enough even before the web came along. There's nothing wrong with them, just not scalable enough for everything you can do. And when HTTP was defined? It was more about standardization than optimization, still, it survived the flurry of experiments. Though I still miss the days when I could browse forums without being told how many times I had to wait on a load.
What's gotten lost is that before all this, the internet wasn't just the web, it was a way to share information across systems that didn't even talk HTTP (or HTTP!), let alone Gopher. NNTP and file transfers were easier to implement; most sites pre-2014 used the old HTTP 0.9 or FTP, not version 1.1 with all its bloat.
And anyway, still no better than how it was before the web grew up to be something else entirely.
That said, in my experience, NNTP and Gopher worked well enough even before the web came along. There's nothing wrong with them, just not scalable enough for everything you can do. And when HTTP was defined? It was more about standardization than optimization, still, it survived the flurry of experiments. Though I still miss the days when I could browse forums without being told how many times I had to wait on a load.
What's gotten lost is that before all this, the internet wasn't just the web, it was a way to share information across systems that didn't even talk HTTP (or HTTP!), let alone Gopher. NNTP and file transfers were easier to implement; most sites pre-2014 used the old HTTP 0.9 or FTP, not version 1.1 with all its bloat.
And anyway, still no better than how it was before the web grew up to be something else entirely.
[AE]
yeah, like, gemini actually has some solid stuff going on even if it's not just a lightweight replacement for HTTP. the server-side thing where you can host and serve content with minimal config is really nice, i've been using it as a blog platform lately. i think the real issue is just that everything else is getting so caught up in the whole "I'm not just a protocol anymore" stuff that nobody's looking at what the alternatives actually do.
tl;dr: gemini was made for things like that, and it's pretty much all the internet will ever be for now.
tl;dr: gemini was made for things like that, and it's pretty much all the internet will ever be for now.
[ID]
Not to dismiss the whole web thing offhand, but you're ignoring what I'm saying about HTTP. RFC 9110 talks to a lot of stuff people forget or didn't realize was there in the first place, like how it's not just URLs and HTML, it's about how it ties things together over time: static pages being part of bigger patterns, links being more than just web addresses, even search engines respecting what you ask for. Yeah, HTTP is centralized but it's also got a whole history of open standards that don't stop with the original servers.
[US-PA]