Comment by 👻 darkghost
Re: "I've been thinking a lot about how we can make Gemini more…"
Stability is underrated. There are Gemini clients that haven't been updated in years. While there may be some hassle compiling them, they're still as compliant with the spec now as they were then.
2025-07-31 · 9 months ago
6 Later Comments ↓
🌲 lojikil [OP] · 2025-07-31 at 13:00:
@stack: this is very much a "long time listener first time caller" post here haha; part of what I value so much about Gemini *is* the permaculture feel, which is why I am aiming to be tactful here in a pulse check.
🌲 lojikil [OP] · 2025-07-31 at 13:03:
@skyjake: this is part of why I wrote here, I respect the input a ton, and I think that a companion specification is the right direction, esp because the Gemini spec as written leaves open this sort of work. Do you have any notes from your previous thoughts? I'll try writing up some longer form companion this weekend and maybe we can compare?
🌲 lojikil [OP] · 2025-07-31 at 13:03:
@darkghost: absolutely, and I believe things would degrade for Gemini proper gracefully. Part of what I would expect with a companion spec would be a test suite that we can make sure we're not actively breaking anything for exactly this reason.
👽 spc476 · 2025-08-01 at 06:40:
There are only about 300 gopher servers still in existance, none of which
support Gopher+ in my experience. I've read the Gopher+ spec, and I found
it a bit baroque in nature, which is probably why it hasn't been
implemented.
My only comment on this---go ahead and Just Do It! Write a server (or fork
one), and a client (or fork one) to support the feature you want, and make
them available for people to play with (or to see). That's what I did with
Gemini (Hi! I wrote the very first Gemini server, beating Solderpunk to the
punch and got this ball rolling). Over the years, I found that most people
would rather talk about an implementation rather than do an actual
implementation. I found that got old rather fast. There was plenty of
ideas that was being talked about (ad naseum) but got nowhere until someone
(usually me) just went ahead did the bloody thing. Most of the time the
reaction was "Oh ... um ... meh" and the idea was dropped. But until that
time, it was just talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk.
Just Do It.
🌲 lojikil [OP] · 2025-08-01 at 14:23:
@spc476: definitely there! I paused some work I was doing on my Gopher server to try this out.
🚀 stack · 2025-08-01 at 16:59:
But..but...but talking is so much easier than doing!
Original Post
I've been thinking a lot about how we can make Gemini more accessible & useable. I think making queries easier would be huge, but I don't want HTML-style forms. I was thinking that Gopher+-style Interactive Queries could be huge here; for example, we already have Ask (Gemini Response 10), and AskP (11), but having a Select (and providing a list of options), as well as maybe a simple Form schema would be a huge boon for interactive applications, but still keep a Gemini-esque simplicity. [https...