Something between gemini protocl/gopher and modern web?
So I think Gemini protocol and gopher are neat and all, but just a little lacking in features (gem not having images or message boards for example). Is there anything else thats slightly more like the web in ~04 ish? Muddying the waters with another protocol is probably a bad idea but something like this could be cool...
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What exactly are you looking for in a protocol? Better discovery? Distribution? Semantics? Security? HTTP hasn't changed a whole lot since 2004 (HTTP 1.1 even got an update in 2022 since it lives side by side with HTTP/2 and the new HTTP/3), and HTTP+TLS is really pretty good at transferring static and semi-static content.
standard HTML+CSS is more than enough for me. They work everywhere with no extra software required, they do all I need, and no one is forced to use JavaScript or whatever dynamic type of content is used to track people and force feed them ads. I certainly don't use those ;)
Unless you need something very specific that I missed in your post, maybe it's worth considering?
Yeah youre right, I guess just a way to stay only on those sites and not get sucked into corpo or slop sites is the hard part! Kagi has smolweb search but its not quite great.
Maybe stating the obvious, but have you tried using RSS to read only the blogs you're interested in?
I do enjoy RSS on capy reader, its finding more of those blogs !
Human curation (the art of selecting and sharing valuable resources) was always at the hearth of RSS and of blogs at their peak (before they became a marketing playground in which most only looked for ways to monetize 'their audience' and/or milk every single cent out of them)
No surprise either that Google and the likes of it are trying so hard to get rid of both RSS and human curation (blogs or otherwise) so they can push humanity aside of the process of accessing to info/knowledge and instead promote their own algorithm (and now, their AI) as the way to access info and knowledge.
Maybe we could start a thread sharing worth reading blogs that still offer RSS, there are a lot less but there are... Sadly, I'm willing to bet it would not take of as already so, so many of us are addicted to being fed content (even quality content, btw) without having to search for it. Fingers crossed I'm wrong.
Totally, and RSS has been shoved under the rug for years. No one I know knows what it is at all. And like you said theyre addicted to fb reel streams and theres no changing that.
So many folks have forgot how to explore. Myself included. Ive had to retrain my brain. Gemini has helped with that, just exploring capsules on there is really fun. But its so hard explaining to Normie's anythibg they can't find in 1 gooe search.
I'm afraid it is true for all of us, more or less visibly. We've all been lazy and the cost is high... and quick. Contrary to real hard work, which is very slow to reward anyone.
Oh man, thats exactly it. EVERYONE wants a quick Fix a tip a cheat etc no one wants to actually learn shit or finds the reward in hard work. Its frustrating and destroying their brains.
Some Gemini clients can render images inline. Lagrange does so if you click an image link on a capsule. and there are discussion forums. bbs.geminispace.org immediately came to me, but while searching for that site I found Station .
The creator of Gemini also made a web server that might help you do what you're looking for, or if you want it to be more period accurate to 2004, I am also aware of some projects of maybe that kind of nature.
I guess it just depends on what you want.