Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.
> Text-based browsers and modern HTML, no success story in sight. Given the progress we see in web technologies, the gap will only widen, so much so that w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.
This is a fun article and the conclusion is very real.
People shit on Gemini:// because “The web can support text documents”. They say this as if they are actually proposing a real solution. It’s true that the web _can_ support lightweight content (IE5 on Windows 3.1- I was there man), but the problem is that it _won’t_ because it consistently chooses not to. If you’ve ever tried to actually perform this experiment of running the web in text mode you will quickly realize how futile it truly is. Every step you take on a well meaning site like lite.cnn.com is just one click away from transferring you to a bloated SPA app that renders a blank screen on a text-based browser. You can disable JavaScript, or disable images or whatever hoops you want to jump through (increasingly hidden with every FireFox release that goes by) but that’s not going to actually work long term. The web is too extensible and feature hungry to support text based content. It’s better to just use the web for the usual cool shit like WASM and WebRTC or whatever and admit that no one can help themselves and no amount of awareness is going to make the cookie consent banners go away.
Let’s take Gemini more seriously because it already has adoption and it works and it’s not perfect but it sure as fuck isn’t substack.
What's the difference between "let's encourage people to create gemini documents" and "let's encourage people to publish text/markdown documents on the www"?
That’s subtle but the Gemtext format is really really constrained, which forces people to do one thing: write text. Nothing else.
So, when you are on Gemini://, you know that you will only encounter linear text. You will read stuff, written by other people. It is really relaxing. I’m a huge fan of Gemini.
I would advice to start your Gemini journey by reading links on Antenna and Cosmos (which are link aggregators)
I'm not. I get the whole "the medium is the message" and why it feels appealing to some, but I don't subscribe to the idea that the only way to have proper digital hygiene is by restraining myself to this ascetic channel. I'd rather encourage more people to put content on the web in whatever form they think is best, and I'll let it up to my user agent to filter out the noise.
The dream of course would be both: if you’re already writing textual content you might as well publish it on both protocols, so anyone can get to it with any tool they like. Gemtext can be trivially converted up to Markdown, the opposite is lossy but very doable.
Quick question on gemini://, I have no idea what gemini:// is but I typed gemini:// on my mac and it prompted to open my iterm shell. Is this a normal behavior, I am using chrome browser.
I really like reading text with variable-width fonts. Gemini requires fixed-width fonts due to its terminal-based approach. Thus, I have no desire to use it ever.
I've only dabbled in Gemini so I don't know their names off the top of my head, but I tried out a number of GUI Gemini browsers in the past, and they're quite nice. Easy on the eyes, simple design, all the variable width fonts you could ask for if that's your bag.
A more pragmatic approach would be to run the content through something like readability[0] but leaves navigation untouched. The AI could hallucinate and add content that isn't in the original, something accessibility tools don't.
I do 90% of my browsing using Offpunk (reading blogs and articles) and, suprizingly, it often works better than a graphical browser (no ads, no popup, no paywall). Of course, it doesn’t work when you really needs JS.
Dillo uses something similar with rdrview, you can use rdrview://$URL (altough I hacked the dpi plugin to use the rd:// 'protocol' for shortness).
It lacks the filter thingy but now has the dilloc tool where it can print the current URL, open a
new page... and with sed you can trivially reopen a page with an alternative from https://farside.link
You know, medium.com -> scribe.rip and the like.
But Dillo is not a terminal browser, altough it's a really barebones one and thanks to DPI and dilloc it can be really powerful (gopher, gemini, ipfs, man, -info in the future) and so on available as simple plugins, either in sh, C or even Go) and inspiring for both offpunk and w3m (where it has similar capabilities as Dillo to print/mangle URL's and the like).
What I'd love is to integrate Apertium (or any translating service) with Dillo as a plugin so by just running trans://example.com you could get any page translated inline without running tons of Google propietary JS to achieve the same task.
I love the https://linux.org.ru forum and often they post interesting setups but I don't speak Russian.
You go to site with your text browser. An LLM loads and renders the content in memory and then is helping to convert that to a text only interface for your tui browser to display and navigate.
Apparently other systems are using a similar method.
Gemini is my go to now when I need a recipe. Pick a recipe site, any recipe site, and its guaranteed to be the most painful experience on mobile, and slightly less painful on a laptop experience you have on the web. Pure fucking trash. And if you happen to be a recipe publisher who does this and is reading this, fuck you.
Enter Gemini. It consistently can give me a text only version of the recipe that I can copy into a notes app if I want with zero pain. Zero. Now I have my own set of "wtf are you doing Gemini" and "why are you halucinating on this request" experiences at work with Gemini, but recipe extraction.. the goat.
Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
If you're interested in this aspect of user agency, you might like the "trustworthy technology" site a few friends and I are working on: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
"There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,”"
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
What I don't understand is why it is so much effort to use linux on a phone. Surely these 8 core ARM monsters these days should be more than enough to handle a full kernel. Hopefully it's not a driver issue where manufacturers only contribute the necessary drivers to the android kernel, not the linux one.
Not really, it makes use of Linux kernel, cages it on pseudo-microkernel architecture since Treble and Mainline refactorings, uses a Java userspace, and the NDK has a quite clear list of what APIs are allowed to be called.
That's still on the Linux kernel. The userspace differences aren't what make it possible to lock down. Someone could just as easily make a locked down desktop Linux, which maybe ChromeOS is already.
The ultimate question is "Would you give up the right of owning your machine to have access to services", and with the decline of rooting scene on Android, the answer is pretty clear.
Sure. But the malaise of smug people taking decisions that are outside of the scope of the software is creeping into linux too. It is up to me decide what is secure, not them.
It does get some coverage on Lobste.rs, the Fediverse and some pockets of the IRC world and retro comp community. If your point is that it has not hit mainstream adoption, I won’t argue that.
The web could in theory support text-first content, but it won't. The Gemini protocol, though not perfect, was built to avoid extensibility that inevitably leads us away from text. I long for the day more bloggers make their content available on Gemspace, the way we see RSS as an option on some blogs.
The web will continue to stray from text-first content because it is too easy to add things that are not text.
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