Comment by int_19h
3 months ago
The different experience is largely thanks to different content, not different protocol. The protocol just serves a gatekeeping role to keep the community small enough.
3 months ago
The different experience is largely thanks to different content, not different protocol. The protocol just serves a gatekeeping role to keep the community small enough.
That's true to some extent, but it's also true that the side-effect of the protocol is that it results in a very different community.
It's a bit like saying that the camping experience has nothing to do with not having access to electricity. Well, true but also not true.
I think that the specifics of the protocol don't actually matter all that much. What matters is that it's sufficiently unappealing to filter out most potential users; you genuinely have to feel strongly about the state of the web etc to spend a lot of time on Gemini.
In that sense, I suspect that OP is right and they could have achieved the same on top of, say, HTML 2 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866).