But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics.
↫ Brennan Dayfinger://,gopher://, andgemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet. None of them require a GUI. None of them require JavaScript. All three of them run in a terminal.
I ran an OSNews Gemini capsule from my office for quite a while, but managing it from my own workstation computer became a little annoying and cumbersome. I should take a weekend off at some point and devise an easy way to convert our RSS feed into separate files for Gopher and Gemini and serve them from my Proxmox mini PC, if only to do my part in contributing to the success of independent protocols.
I think it is a great shame that enthusiasm for alternative protocols has diminished so greatly. Even if now dated, the concepts behind some of them would be interesting to see at scale, with actual participation. I won’t deny the utility of the “web” the world settled on, and perhaps a singularity was inevitable. But there is more to life than document service, and it seems weird that our interconnected digital world is built around that single concept alone, with everything else bolted on.
Huh? R&D around Internet protocols is extremely active. There is a huge amount of academic and industry work aimed at improving the speed, security, scalability, reliability, and architecture of the global network.
FWIW It is probably one of the most active areas in networking. At all levels, e.g. transport layer protocols like QUIC, security protocols, congestion control, routing, DNS, measurement, path aware networking, cloud infrastructure, etc.
It is definitely not some stagnant area.
Yes, please do revive the OSnews gopher/gemini. I have mostly found personal blogs on those protocols (including my own) which is fine, but they tend to bounce all over the place and lack coherent structure.
Thank you very much, Thom. This is much appreciated. Getting back into Gemini:// right now with Lagrange. Its default mode is Not a terminal programme, but a very good one still.
While it’s good people are trying alternatives, Gemini and the Gopher revival are just knee-jerk reactions to the modern world. Everything they do, HTML can and better.