Kevin Boone: The Gemini Protocol in 2026: growing, but still not setting the Internet aflame
kevinboone.me
The Gemini protocol has been around for over five years, but the world-wide web remains broken. This articles reviews what’s changed for the better over the last five years – and what hasn’t.

With surveillance capitalism reaching it’s peak in 2026/2027, is getting out the Web the only way for the privacy inclined user?

Will Gemini (or cousins) go the way of Linux? Or is it foverer condemned to go the way of Hurd

  • Elw@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    6·
    19 hours ago

    Exactly. This is one of the fundamental things that I never understood about Gemini. It’s simply a “web” that doesn’t support some of the features of the modern web that the author finds objectionable. I have no problem with anyone doing that or with the author’s objections but they did a lot of work to do what could have simply been done with a specific set of tools and “rules” applied to the existing HTTP/HTML web.

    • Create a standard for what subset of HTML standards are supported and maybe define some headers for these pages to use to enable crawlers to identify them
    • Build some browsers that only support the standard subset
    • Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard
    • ???
    • Profit
    • macniel@feddit.org
      1·
      18 hours ago

      Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard

      and how do you propose to impose that? Heck robots.txt doesn’t even seem to be honored!

      • FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        Heck robots.txt doesn’t even seem to be honored!

        Eh. I make web pages for friends and family. We don’t want them indexed. In my server logs, most of the big scrapers are pretty good about honoring robots.txt. Google does. Meta does. At least some the AI scrapers do. Pretty sure Bytedance does too but I’d have to double check.

        I’ll see a hit from let’s say G’s bot, fetching robots.txt, and then no other activity. For all the thigns I can shit on G and Meta for, this isn’t one of them.

        Is it universal to heed it? Nah, ofc not. But it’s still more effective than you’d think, given it is voluntary.