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An alternative decentralized internet for sharing text and media: The Gemini Protocol (geminiprotocol.net)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/buyfromeu@feddit.org

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It is similar to the old gopher: text files, links, and images form a hypertext optimized for reading. Text is formatted like Markdown - but even simpler.

Clients display text, like an eBook, or images / media.

Since it does not use "addictive by design" UI elements, like feeds, timelines, likes and upvotes, colorful and distracting elements, endless scrolling, as well as comments that invite trolling, it feels a lot calmer.

Servers can run on a PC or Raspberry Pi which needs half a Watt of power. No FAANG companies needed. No expert knowledge needed - not more difficult than running a file sharing client.

I think it is the right thing for defense of democracy and sharing your voice in the digital realm.

Edit: If you see comments here which kinda miss the point, appeal to emotions, have faulty logic, or depart from entirely incorrect assumptions: Please keep in mind that big US tech companies can't say "that's bad, how will we shovel money with this?". Please use your critical thinking skills - they are much needed here!

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[–] termaxima@slrpnk.net 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is not a decentralized "Internet" (which is by definition decentralised). It's an alternative to the Web ; which is also decentralised.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

To your argument that the Internet and the WWW are decentralized:

On the level of the TCP/IP protocol, it is decentralized in the sense it can route around failures (it was designed to survive a nuclear attack).

(As an aside, the routing protocols, specifically BGP, can however be manipulated - that happened during the attack on Venezuela. It can also be blocked, see Iran - throwing a black veil on many people's death.)

But in respect to how the modern web of HTML/HTTP is set up and used, it is not decentralized at all:

Every street food shop seems to need a FaceBook page
Individuals communicate mainly over WhatsApp
Teens use mainly Instagram and TicToc
Community-Owned web forums have almost disappeared, most moved to Facebook, and personal blogs are dying out
most private web sites use Google and Facebook tracking devices, like like buttons, tracking pixels, Google analytics, fingerprinting, and so on
Sites like medium.com, originally meant for personal writing by people who put in time, are succumbing to commercialization and AI slop
The only open source browser code base, Firefox, has sunken to 2.2% market share. This means that Google can push things like DRM into Web standards which means the browser is running software which by principle is not controlled by the user, but by somebody else. This is very bad!
ECommerce runs dominantly on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure
Payments use dominantly PayPal

To sum up, without very few large and (in many senses of the word) power-hungry US companies, namely Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Paypal, Apple, the WWW and with it, a good part of the European ecobomy, would come to a standstill.

Put plainly, they can more or less switch Europe off if they want.

And we can't even have political discussions on European matters without Google and Facebook tracking this.