Alternative transports, philosophy [was: Gemini server logging formats and practices]

[solderpunk]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 09:07:00AM -0700, Dave Huseby wrote:
> Now...let the trolling begin! Let's see who can flame each other better. ; )

It would be great if we could just refrain from trolling or flaming
each other entirely -- even weird, happy-smiley pseudo-trolling -- and
just have normal conversations, which can of course include polite and
adult disagreement!

Just weighing in on a few points quickly:
 
> > > Right now the only thing we can do is willfully
> > > blind our servers. Eventually though, if all goes according to plan,
> > > Gemini servers will be running on a mixnet of some kind 
> > 
> >   Really?  I don't recall seeing such a plan myself.  Solderpunk, are you
> > holding out on me?
> 
> You're not wrong. I made a mistake implying the Gemini had *anything* to do
> with my efforts fix the Internet status quo.

I'll admit that I've never given serious thought to alternative
transports, but the spec *does* take care to say "When Gemini is served
over TCP/IP, servers should listen on port 1965", implying that it might
be done over things other than TCP/IP.  I could have *sworn* I also
explicitly called it an "application layer" protocol, but apparently not.
I *will* fix that, it's always been my intent.

If people want to run Gemini over some sort of new-fangled mixnet
transport layer that's absolutely fine by me, and I'd regard such
experiments with keen interest.  But as far as I'm concerned that's
largely orthogonal to the Gemini spec proper.

To some extent, the spec privileges TCP/IP, or rather transport and
internet layer protocols which don't provide any encryption.  TLS is
designed in deeply enough that removing it would be problematic, which
means means that there is guaranteed to be some redundancy if the
higher layers provide security features of their own.

I would rather address this when and if any such alternative layers
achieve significant traction by introducing a separate, relatively
simple new specification - in the spirit of DNS over TLS or HTTP -
rather than trying to totally generalise the spec now.  If these new
layers are so radically different that refactoring Gemini to work over
them isn't trivial, then people can just define a new protocol native to
that transport which is heavily Gemini-inspired, in the way that Gemini
is heavily Gopher-inspired.

This reflects my general stance on the appropriate balance for Gemini
to strike between philosophical and technical considerations.  I don't
think it will come as a surprise to anybody that I'm an idealist.  I am
interested in making the internet a better place, and I consider Gemini
to be doing precisely that.  However, I have pretty humble ambitions
with this project.

By the standards of a lot of projects concerned with "making the
internet a better place", Gemini looks decidedly old-fashioned or
conservative.  It's client-server and not peer-to-peer, content is
hosted in one place on the originating server and is not replicated
across requesting clients, and stuff is addressed by location and not
content.  Heck, it doesn't even have a blockchain in it!

These decisions obviously place a limit on just how revolutionary we can
be in fixing the ills of the web.  But I also think these decisions are
one of Gemini's great strengths.  Gemini should feel overwhelmingly
familiar to most technical people, both in terms of the primitives it's
built from (URLs, MIME types, TLS) and the conceptual ideas that join
them together.  I think this fact is in no small part responsible for
Gemini, despite being small and young, already having no shortage of
implementations.  Meanwhile, the internet is full of - and has been for
a long, long time - more ambitious, radical projects with a lot more
"cognitive friction" which haven't taken off.

I welcome input from hardcore idealists and philosophers, because I
think it's good to keep one eye on the stars (an appropriate
metaphor for this project!).  But I'm going to meet those ideals
only as far as I think we can while keeping Gemini conceptually light
and easy for people to pickup and begin working with.  We won't
completely solve every single problem with the web this way, but
we'll make real improvements.  Incremental progress is still progress,
and widely-deployed progress is the best kind.

Cheers,
Solderpunk