On hacker friendly protcols as sanctuaries of sanity

I see people expressing hope of protocols like Gemini, or even Gopher, may
function as backwaters where discourse and reaching out to other people may
still have a hope of functioning. I am writing this to sort out my own opinion
of this question.

HTTP started as an underspecified and very simple mess. This made it easy to
almost implement as well as expand. The current combination of de facto and
formal standards which has evolved is still a mess, but is now extremely complex
as well.

Apart from Gemini being a lot cleaner, one might say Gemini is not unlike HTTP
0.9. I think this is the weakness and strength of Gemini. On the one hand, it is
hacker friendly, on the other hand, if Gemini should start attracting mainstream
attention history may quickly repeat itself. Chrome will get a Gemini plug-in,
AMP will be integreted with Gemini, the Gemini document format fork used by
Apple and Google will gain support for inline JavaScript, and so on.

Gemini does not seek to displace the current HTTPS+HTML+JavaScript dog's
breakfast often called the web, so the scenario above is 99% hyperbole. On the
other hand, what we see here is the typical curse of the sub-culture. It will
either be marginal or it will lose its identity. The minute the Gemini ecosystem
is viewed as a viable market by a sufficiently large corporation, the honeymoon
is over.

The question then arises, what does Gemini give, which the low-tech web does not
already supply? The only answer I can find is self-selection; the only people
active on Gemini have made an active choice of doing so. This is in stark
contrast to the web as a whole.

Also, of course, hacking the protocol is fun. I wrote a Gemini server myself,
https://repare.re/kabong/kabong.xhtml , mainly because it's fun.

My personal conclusion from these ramblings is that Gemini is fun and
worthwhile, but viewing it as some sort of solution to the current quandary of
surveillance capitalism is overly optimistic. Either it is marginal, and stays
useful, or it gains traction, Microsoft buys an RFC and complexity and features
only useful to FAANG will quickly be added.

2020-08-28, Steinar Knutsen