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

[colecmac at protonmail.com]

Thanks for clearing things up a bit, and dialing the troll level down.

As someone who's played around a fair bit with alternative
networks, I just want to point out (more to Dave than you) that TCP/IP,
and therefore Gemini, really shouldn't conflict with the idea of an
alternative, private, "mixnet" network. If I think about encrypted
mesh networks like CJDNS or Yggdrasil (maybe even TOR?), Gemini will
work completely out of the box on those networks, as long as your
servers and clients support IPv6. No need to redefine new protocols
or spec. The only inefficiency is that you also have TLS, when those
networks already mandate encryption, but that's not such an issue. I'm
happy that Gemini mandates it anyway, because most of its use will be
on the regular Internet.

> 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 like this point about cognitive friction a lot. The best kind of
technology is one that gets out of your way, and I think Gemini is on
its way to doing that. I like the simplicity of it, I think it'll allow
it to achieve so much.

makeworld

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Wednesday, May 13, 2020 5:10 PM, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

> 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