I definitively am (my capsule is gemini://idiomdrottning.org and I write about all three of those things) but I often feel kind of alone with that perspective. There's a lot of "let's go Branden" type curmudgeonliness which I'm not into, or weird Time Cube type stuff. I only know of a handful of other leftist capsules (love them ♥).

Also, While the merits of left-wing policies and of punk aesthetics can certainly be called into question, criticizing "ecological" is like saying "and the posters on there are subject to gravity! They fall downwards, and they have the gall to live their lives going forwards in time!" We all live on the same Earth and wrecking it affects all of us.

> Maybe if you don't have many leftist friends you'll find it more novel, but I found it full of the same talking points and little else.

It's not my intention to re-harp on the same points already made a thousand times but to instead afford a new way of thinking about systems and markets. I try to update older posts rather than make new ones about the same thing.

> I also find the place way too judgemental. The community loves to hate on anyone that doesn't share their aesthetic.

Here, I can only agree, and I'm often guilty of this, too. I see how people wanna warp or distort the aesthetic (for example, produce spec-breaking sites or accessibility obstacles) but as I try to clarify it I end up inadvertently slamming those who aren't into the whole minimalism brain trip and that's a real problem.

The first step is realizing that it was deliberately designed to be inextensible. Anything that can be extended will accrue bloat.

The second step is to realize that it's really just plain text. Once you realize that, the choices about what kinds of formatting make total sense:

   * bulleted lists, but not hierarchical
   * links but they have to be in a paragraph of their own
   * preformatted blocks but no italics
   * linewrapping but no collapsing of multiple sequential linebreaks
   * headings but no boldface
   * blockquote with > just like email (*are you listening, @dang?*)

In a way, this is just an extension of the "first step". If you start allowing rich markup, where do you stop? Not allowing anything that would make the markup itself any less readable provides a natural point at which to halt extensibility, for principled reasons.

I recently discovered that Lagrange will treat a link to an image as a lazily-loaded inline image -- you have to click the link to make the image appear, but it appears inline where the link had been instead of replacing the page that linked to it. I think this is a really beautiful way to enhance the experience for people reading through a GUI without tempting authors to do anything that would burden people who are reading through a terminal.

The only big wart on the whole thing is TLS. It's cute that it solves the TCP truncation problem, but that's a lot of bloat to pay in return. I guess there isn't yet something at Layer 4 that is as minimal, elegant, and battle-tested as wireguard (Layer 3) to take the place of TLS though.

    * Inline links everywhere tempting you to click away to a new page, both fracturing your attention as well as being a multiple-second delay between pages
    * Images are everywhere, needing to be interpreted by the rendering engine of the ereader either with a simple monochromatic threshold to figure out what parts of the fully color image are black and white, or if you're lucky it has some way to re-process the image through dithering so that it's possible to see what it is
    * web layouts always wanting you to have a screen larger than an ereader can support, so you're stuck scrolling back and forth on a tiny screen that already has a miserable refresh rate of once or twice a second.
    * the web is an application platform now, the vast majority of its features just not fitting within what an ereader can support

But the thing that keeps drawing me back to is is that while you can easily implement Gemini with HTML and HTTP, it is impossible to implement HTML and HTTP in Gemini. The fact that you can't implement a webapp in Gemini means that if you're browsing pages in Gemini, you get a consistent experience and every site is clean and respectful of the experience (whether the author wanted to respect it or not, they have no choice).

Perhaps the real counter-argument to Gemini is not "why don't website authors just make their websites simpler?" but instead "why don't modern browsers run in 'reader mode' by default?".

=> gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

Note: anyone can submit an RSS/Atom feed to Antenna, but submissions from Techrights.org and Kiwi Farms are blocked by default.

Gemini was first published roughly in 2019. At about three years old, what protocol has a standards board? It's too young.

It took C roughly 17 years to get a standards body.

It took Gopher three years to get the first RFC [1]. Was it a proprietary protocol? It was the same age as Gemini currently is.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20211026220037/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2021/007388.html#%3C704705533.350997.1635162832645@ichabod.co-bxl%3E

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1436