Mercury

[Phil Leblanc]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 2:27 PM Case Duckworth <acdw at acdw.net> wrote:
>
> I think Mercury is a bad idea, at least for now, when Gemini is still very young and not established (or just established). For one thing, TLS was the main reason solderpunk even began thinking about an alternative to gopher (see gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/why-gopher-needs-crypto.txt), and it's really the most important part of the protocol. Specifically the concerns over censorship, traffic modification, PGP key transmission, etc. I think removing TLS (or some kind of crypto) is a bad idea for that reason.

I will check the  Solderpunk's document. Thanks for the pointer.

Regarding Gemini vs. Gopher,  I do think that the very simple
request/response protocol and the great text/gemini document format
with links embedded in the text are together by far _the_  great step
forward, from Gopher to Gemini.

> If you don't want to use TLS, use gopher. Gemini isn't trying to be everything for everyone -- it specifically mentions that it's *not* trying to supplant gopher or http, and it's trying to be a *new* protocol, built from the ground up with modern sensibilities. Mercury is a step backward in that regard

I find it hard to follow you here. Do you imply that starting with
Mercury and adding TLS would be a step forward, in terms of _newness_?

>  remember how much work was put into the public education part of looking to the little green lock at the address bar of browsers, and how long it took for most of the web (even now, not all of it's https) to switch to https?

Definitely yes. And the same could be said about HTML and HTTP:
remember how much work has been put in education and development and
infrastructure to put in place the web as we know it!  -- Is it enough
of a reason not to try another way?

> Best,
> Case (acdw)

Thanks for your input.  I want to reiterate that with respect to
Gemini, my biggest gripe is _mandatory_ TLS, not TLS itself.

I feel a bit like a guy discovering a group of people trying to
establish an utopian community from the ground up, based on fresh and
frugal principles. After digging a bit, I found that they mandate the
use of Toyota SUV for transportation in all the villages (because they
are available everywhere in the world and are efficient for
transportation).

Maybe villages without Toyota SUVs could also be part of the utopian
community? :-)

Cheers,

Phil