Re: Hello Gemini

Thought I'd comment on the two comments in your post.

TOFU

The big thing with certs is that they perform two tasks. The first is that it shows ownership of domains. Reading through the cert you can see that the entity owning `fu.br` is the same that owns `foobar.com`. Shortened URLs, secondary domains for specific services, etc. The certs help tie them all together.

The second task is to provide a way to identify the content is from said owner. You know there isn't a man-in-the-middle passing you bogus content, trying to trick you or steal your information. If you trust my cert you know reading this post that it is me and two weeks from now when you read another post it is still me.

The problem here is that no one actually reads the certs. We care about the little padlock on our browser and that is it. When an error pops up saying "Hey the cert changed and we are a little suspicious all we do is click ignore. We have no communial place to say "Hey, so GiM's cert changed, anyone else see that?" None of us seem to care that much because we are just here to read each others content and not hand over our credit card numbers.

using certificates signed by existing CA is a bad thing

The reasoning here is about removal of power. Having a central CA means they can revoke your cert at any time, or worse yet, could have their global cert stolen or revoked breaking the entire system. There was actually an issue with Let's Encrypt's CA expiring which caused a lot of sites to lose their green padlock for a short period.

But again, none of us really seem to care. We all clicked ignore and moved on with our lives. Anyone using Let's Encrypt, or using self signed certs aren't providing services that we care about enough to be super security concious.

The reason we don't care about a decentralized altnerative is again, no one cares that much. With a centralized service we see them as an authority and just accept what they say. We move to a decntralized alternative and the authority of the central service is replaced with a "too difficult to hack" mindset that now we see as the authority. That is a whole lot of work for something we just click ignore on when it fails.

gemtext or text/gemini

I too prefer Markdown. I write most of documentation, presentations and formal documents in Markdown. But I'm also from a generation that wrote a lot of documents in LaTeX. I wanted the control over how my document looked and didn't want to rely on other software to hopefully do it right.

That is not what Gemini is about. Content, with no noise. Being able to consume chunks of data as independt atoms, both programmatically and as a human, has extreme benefits. Inline links, images breaking up flows. We assume that all browser will show things the same way but that just wouldn't be the case and suddenly we are funning into an issue as to why use something more complex than what we need.

Smolweb is about simplicity. Going back to the internet I first grew up with, Gopher was so simple that all you were there for was content. That is what the community is trying to revive. Personally, I read way more content in Gemini because I can just pull it up and get right to what I'm there for and not have to fuss with ads, oddly placed images, broken css, etc.

Glad to see more people showing up and writing. More posts, more applications...more everything.

$ published: 2025-07-31 10:30 $

$ tags: smolweb $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2025-07-31

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