The vibes of the early internet are still out there, you just won't be directed there by Google or any of the other "social" silos.
Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.
Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.
Gemini to me feels to be dying, every time I open lagrange there's another 10% or so of the default bookmarks that are perma-offline; and the sites like geminispace.info have fewer and fewer results
Gemini is Markdown-but-worse over HTTP-but-worse. The modern Web and all its crappiness didn't come about because there's something inherently wicked in HTML and HTTP, it came about because people built things on top of the basic foundation, extending (sometimes poorly) and expanding.
The more people play with Gemini, the more they'll want to "extend" it... and the closer they'll bring it to HTTP, because it follows the exact same fundamental model once you strip off the extraneous document format specification. Hell, there's no reason you couldn't serve HTML over the Gemini protocol, along with Javascript and all the rest.
I've said before, if you want to pretend you're an undergrad in 1993, go play around on LambdaMOO or something else that actually dates from that time, something that's more interesting than shipping text files over "HTTP but the status codes are shorter". Hell, all anybody does on Gemini is write their "gemlogs" anyway, and if you want to publish short texts on a weird system that needs users to run a special client anyway...
> @create $note named "blog post 9/11/2024"
> write "This is the first line of my blog post" on blog
Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.
Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.