Comment by 👻 darkghost
Re: "Which websites would be better on Gemini?"
Any information that favors text. Recipes, logs, reference, how-to's, news, short fiction, weather reports, stocks, I'm sure some I'm forgetting. It isn't good for maps, media, picture galleries, games (besides text based games), charts, in-browser applications, real time chat, and of course, annoying advertising.
2024-12-01 · 1 year ago
6 Later Comments ↓
💀 requiem · 2024-12-01 at 00:38:
News, possibly long form essay content, blogs, and microblogs.
Wildcard take possibly but I could see potential in hosting podcasts.
Actually I wouldn’t mind seeing video streaming content either. Anything is an improvement over what video sharing has become. A YT frontend as minimalistic as Piped would be pretty sweet.
💀 requiem · 2024-12-01 at 00:41:
Oh and reference libraries for things. Like IRL library catalogues to programming language documentation.
Yesterday, all of a sudden I remembered twenty-odd years ago, when I discovered guitar tabs. Years later, some of the results you'd get from googling for tabs were as effed up as the rest of the web...
Not sure how it's going nowadays, but... yeah, music tabs could work fantastically over Gemini.
There was also something called "abc notation" that would work. But I don't even remember how that worked.
🦂 zzo38 · 2024-12-07 at 23:15:
I mostly agree with @darkghost. However, I think that even some text-based games would better work with others than Gemini, such as interactive protocols such as Telnet and SSH. A lot of things would be better served with protocols other than HTTP and file formats other than HTML; in some cases Gemini would be good but other times it isn't good.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · 2025-03-08 at 22:55:
News and recipes instantly came to mind. Opinion blogs for sure... anything that is primarily text. The rather iconoclastic nature of the protocol means that scientific studies and wikipedia-esque articles (where the picture is germaine to the content, not just manipulation) would struggle.
I'd argue though that a better question isn't "what kind of content works better here" but rather "what motivations for publishing work better here." To that end, news doesn't stand a chance... it lives and dies by the incentives of the crowded attention economy. Gemini reminds me much of the first place I saw gopher: in a library, as an early kind of reference catalogue.
I guess the "content" motivations are mainly social (at bboards and also personal capsule gemlogs) and archival. The beauty is that anyone could theoretically write and host their own capsule, so it's resilient in the same sense that I could call my personal bookshelves a "library."
Personally, I'd love to see a lot more reference materials indexed here. I want to be able to look on gemini for questions like (randomly): "what is the spleen for" or "what cocktails can I make with Campari." It'd also be great to have mirrors of gutenberg.org books and non-AI-polluted wikipedia would be great too.
I'm not sure whether image-sharing sites work in this format. I use amfora because I want to browse in the terminal, so I'm not used to seeing images in gemtext. Without a way to do thumbnails, most image-driven sites break. I'm okay with that. I would love to see something like the old elfwood come back though... that place was neat in its heyday, and seems like it harmonizes with the ethos of a smolweb.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · 2025-03-11 at 20:28:
Oh also: Translation services. This is text-based for most languages, and apart from the annoying header-request-size limit (if I'm even describing it rightly), it would work really well here. Landing page asks for the text you want translated, you enter it and hit "submit" and then it gives you a translation.
Original Post
Which websites would be better on Gemini? — From a user perspective, which websites do you think would be improved by being served via Gemini instead of HTTP, and why? News websites is a pretty good example I think, given that it'd give users direct access to key content without having to deal with ads and popups.