Web Revival

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A movement focused on capturing the creativity and openness of the early Internet.

We aren't here to watch Big Web burn (we have plenty of communities for that) but to find positive ways we can make the Small Web better.

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The Gemini protocol, a lighter alternative to the web's HTTP (geminiprotocol.net)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it's barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.

Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It's self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.

Of course, you'll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I’d love to see support for the protocol baked into the big browsers.

I really think we missed an opportunity to have an app:// protocol back in the ’00s instead of trying to kludge HTML into being software.

Browsers could totally do multiple protocols. I think ftp:// and gopher:// still works on most of them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Used to -- I think both ftp:// and gopher:// have been removed by the big browsers (eg Chrome and Firefox).

Can't have competing standards that might let us avoid ads now, can we?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

B-but think of the golden parachute the Mozilla CEO can get!