One thing that's been playing on my mind for quite a while now - and has led to my discovery of this whole **gemini protocol** - is that the internet as a whole is too big and too fast. By this I don't mean the whole internet; there's obviously a need for the internet (and networking in general) to go as fast as possible. In my work alone, there is a need to read/write patient's details and medical and appointment information between systems and to clinicians as soon as it is demanded.
But for the most of our human browsing, the internet is too bloated...
Cast your minds back and back to the early days of the internet, back then we were...
I'm not arguing for a return to the heyday of the pre-internet, I'm not a luddite, but perhaps we could have a best of both worlds approach.
We don't need 24/7 connected devices, with up to date data accessible all of the time; perhaps we could reduce that refresh rate down a bit...
We could have locally hosted solutions that we can pull copies of major knowledge hubs to access offline, the zim file and projects like Kiwix already have established this kind of solution and provide copies of many sites; including wikipedia, programming language documentation, ted talks, and project gutenberg.
Other more ephemeral sites, such as news sites and blogs, where we might only want a block of the most recent posts/entries/articles at a time can be be refreshed periodically (much like receiving the daily newspaper!). RSS/Atom feeds are already a method for tracking this, we just need something that downloads and stored these pages for access at a later point; this is something that Offpunk has started. Whilst it is a command line browser, I do enjoy the methodology behind it and it can be configured to open pages in a more GUI-y friendly browser.
The content of websites are now bloated too, I find myself using http version of sites less if there's a gemini or gopher equivalent see...
HINT! If you want to access gemini pages over http, here's a list of proxies
As you can see with my site (if you're on the http version), it is as minimal as possible; in fact, it's developed for gemini, with a bit of HTML & CSS added to the http version when building and deploying. Browsers like LaGrange provide nice ample styling over these plaintext versions.
Communication is an interesting thing to consider, whilst voip and video-calls exist, and there's no simple "slow" way to resolve instant communication; there's still communication via social media and emails that exist.
Email is a simple one, we can configure email pulls to a set schedule, and browse offline afterwards, even replies or new emails could be drafted or stored in an outbox to be pinged out at that IMAP/SMTP refresh time.
Social media is an interesting one, personally I'm in two minds over social media - I hate the current state of things, with a couple of monolythic techbro institutions determining what and who people are paying attention to, with the ultimate goal not being interaction or community building, but data mining, ad serving, and political conniving. But at the same time, the ease of being able to communicate across the world in a massive forum does have its positives. I do like the look of OSS solutions (Mastadon, Plemora, and the like), but something that pricks my ears even more is Secure Scuttlebutt and it's spiritual successor PZP.
It's a gossip network that can be updated via the internet (obvs), but also via passing by nodes (via a number of different communication methods); it's a kind of a mix between the town noticeboard, bluesky feeds and, nintendo ds streetpass.
Which brings me to SlothNet (url to be determined), an umbrella of tools to aid me (and whoever else wants to) in grabbing internet stuff slowly. I'll start with email as I think that's probably the easiest, but I want the core functionality exists as a repository, and a number of front ends and bult-ons as pluggable modules. Once the site is up, I'll make the repositories available, along with weekly/monthly logs to tell the void what's going on.
Watch this space!
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