How is the issue not bloated websites? You can easily create a text only website in HTML which is compatible with every existing internet capable device. All technology can be misused, it isn’t necessarily a problem with the underlying technology. By introducing yet more standards and technologies, you end up creating bloat and fragmentation of a different kind.

There is also an allure of having a client that will never run some weird god-know-what-doing javascript code.

Of course you can just disable javascript in your HTTP browser. But as the author states, it's easier to write a completely new client than to disable all the bloat in e.g. firefox.

Agreed, but like I’ve said elsewhere the effort would be better spent modifying an existing browser to be lightweight. That would gain more widespread adoption than a whole new client-server protocol. You’d also gain the benefit of better interoperability with screen readers and such like.

Nobody involved in Gemini wants "widespread adoption", because that inevitably means big commercial organisations coming into the space where right now they're having a lovely time building a community.

Screen readers handle Gemini just fine - one of the clients I've tried outputs text and buttons in a GTK window, another literally just outputs text into a terminal and takes command line input, if a screenreader couldn't handle that I'd be horrified. The format is paragraph-based, there's very little styling, no guessing at what the main content on a page is.

So you say the "effort". There are 50-some line gemini clients, and more than a few people have coded graphical clients in a few days by themselves. Same with servers. Is modifying firefox or palemoon really going to be a "better spent" effort?

I think screen readers can read text pretty well, also, since you've declared that to be a goal for some reason.

Unfortunately, having worked on both Chromium and Firefox, I can inform you that modifying an existing browser to be lightweight is an unfeasible project.

It's a waste of time compared to just making something new. That doesn't mean that normal browsers couldn't also get gopher support for those not interested in a lightweight browser.

Your browser is a monster of a machine, even when loading a text-only HTML page. The browser UI itself is a web application, after all.

You cannot do anything lightweight with a browser supporting, and itself being written in, web technologies.

Fragmentation is intentional. Although, nothing stops a web browser from also gaining gemini/gopher support. Just won't be "minimal".

> Because the problem is the technology everyone else is using

Introducing new technology doesn't change the technology everyone else is using if it doesn’t provide a reason for them to switch. Gemini seems to appeal very much to the issues of a very narrow group of users and, I suspect, an even smaller proportion of content creators. I don't see how it has any effect on the technology everyone else is using.

It's a subculture. I think the key is in the definition of 'everyone'; I doubt anybody imagines everybody in the world switching to Gemini from the web. So 'everyone' in this context means all the people who have collectively agreed to stick to minimal text format.

You could try the same thing with a community dedicated to minimal HTML--heck, you could say that's what HN itself is, almost--but it would have no effective border. You'd keep falling back into the bad old web. This makes the border explicit, instead.

Good point, but I doubt there will be any kind of meaningful adoption, I think the effort would be better spent modding chromium or such like to strip out crap from existing websites rather than creating a new client-server protocol.

As I understand it they are not aiming for bringing in the masses, so an additional barrier is fine, or even a feature.

That's the point. A web browser is a behemoth—the extreme opposite of minimalism and efficiency—and can only grow.

Creating an entirely parallel stack is the only way to obtain minimalism at this point.

Appealing to those liking web technologies would be counter productive, as they're part of the problem being mitigated.

That doesn't answer the question, and doesn't even make sense.