I don't knock Gemini for existing and being a neat project, but even for hobby it seems too restrictive. No cookies means no authenticated interaction with a site, no inline images means it's less informative than a 100 year old encyclopedia.

Perhaps a "Simple Web" spec could be created to audit a site and verify its privacy and simplicity protections. Things like "Cookies only for auth", "No JS" or "low JS", "No ref tracking in or out", "No tracking pixels", etc.

▲

akkartik 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You'd have to prove these things are possible in the face of the ingenuity of the entire adtech industry. The limitations you point out, on the other hand, have easy solutions:

* auth: Look at https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services Tons of services support some form of auth.

Edit: https://martinrue.com/station is another service I use that's missing in the above list.

* images: click to load

Janky but doable. Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

▲

CharlesW 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

I don't understand, unless adtech is holding your family hostage and forcing you to adtech. Can you elaborate?

▲

akkartik 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want to support cat pictures that show up without clicking a link, but prevent any behavioral exhaust from tracking pixels, that seems to be an open problem. Every new feature is like this: a risk surface until proven otherwise. So to reduce risk you have to limit features, i.e. jank.

▲

CharlesW 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The claim was, "Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech", but adtech cannot prevent you from making a jank-less, universally accessible page or site about your cats or whatever you like. IMHO, one really can't be part of the solution if one's left the protocols mainstream for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.

	▲	akkartik 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're right from the perspective of a website author, but the original comment I responded to is from the perspective of the protocol designer. There is no known way to design a protocol that can be used to create polished experiences without also letting some ingenious website suck up behavioral data. > One can still be part of the solution without leaving the modern-standards-based mainstream altogether for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods. So many judging words there. A new protocol is an off-grid cabin in the woods, but building a non-janky universally accessible website isn't? You'll have to prove you can get a random new website more traffic over https without doing nefarious shit and letting the big adtech companies crawl it.

▲

SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nothing prevents a gemini browser from showing inline images (though it might be officially discouraged?). They are just links.

But actually loading images separately can work well. If you are reading for the text content you can save the time and bandwidth to load of all the images, or maybe you want to look at one image in detail, you can load just that one, and zoom or frame that independently of the surrounding text.