seirdy.one/content/notes/problems-with-gemini.md

title	date	replyURI	replyTitle	replyType	replyAuthor	replyAuthorURI
Problems with Gemini	2022-09-05T21:43:11-07:00	https://nya.social/notes/818310555359e1292a5f9b15	Hey what if we remade Gopher but closed it off to older machines by forcing usage of TLS?	SocialMediaPosting	@allison@nya.social	https://nya.social/@allison

You can run TLS 1.2 and 1.3 on plenty of 90s-era setups. A typical Gemini page is small, so you might have to blink twice while ChaCha-POLY1305 does its thing. TLS might exclude retro servers, but not clients.

If Gemini had these changes, I'd be happy:

• Use something better than TOFU-based TLS for transit encryption (Tor, Yggdrasil, DANE-based-TLS, etc.)

• If using TLS: use a small subset of TLS 1.3. Maybe just stick to ECDSA + ChaCha-POLY1305.

• Drop ASCII art: overloading programming-language indicators and ASCII-art alt-text is an accessibility hazard

• Add some sort of "download finished without aborting early" indicator (e.g. something like Content-Length)

• Add some way to reliably work with a larger page, e.g. using compression or range-requests with pagination. My full-text Atom feed is almost 1 mb uncompressed, but under 200 kb with Brotli compression. Downloading a full-text export of my Gemini capsule without a content-length header or compression sounds bad.

The main thing I like about Gemtext is links on their own lines. This gets people to use longer/descriptive link text and also makes them serve as navigational aids better than their HTML counterparts.

Honestly, I'm less interested in the technology than the community. Gemini Space is a comfy change of pace.