The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it’s barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.
Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It’s self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.
Of course, you’ll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.
Because it was designed on purpose to not even have the ability to be enshittified. No scripting engine, on purpose – no popup ads. No cookies, no tracking.
Things that were originally thought as good things to add to the browser in retrospect have been abused so much, it’s better to not have them available for mis-use.
The issue is the structures motivating companies to enshittify. Not the technology. Blame late stage capitalism not JavaScript.
I will never NOT blame JavaScript for ANYTHING
You know JavaScript allows websites to be more local first, right? Apps that would otherwise require a server to handle a lot of the rendering logic. Sure, you can wish we had a front-end scripting language other than JavaScript, but modern JavaScript is pretty good actually. There’s been a ton of work by browsers to optimize performance, and TypeScript has made shipping JavaScript with confidence much easier. Facebook has made it possible with Hermes to ship bite code pre-compiled JavaScript. The entire JavaScript tool chain is currently being rewritten to Rust and Go for massive speed increases. I’ve been writing JavaScript for a decade, and it used to suck. It’s a wonderful time to write JavaScript.
I know what JavaScript is.
I’m saying any language could perform the same function.
My issue is with the design of the language and its gargbage feature set.
What would you change about JavaScript? Like specific language features you don’t like. Not general statements.
Types?
Edit:
For clarity, consider all the shit an actual real production scenario demands of layering on library after library and framework after fucking framework to make it usable.
Nobody even USES “JavaScript”, they use like 7 layers to try and turn it into a production ready environment.
Why.
Because JavaScript sucks.
Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of what other languages come with out of the box.
TypeScript solves most of your type issues. Zod gives you runtime enforcement of those types if you want, if you can stomach installing a library. But it’s true it’s not actually a statically typed language with built-in runtime enforcement of types. I hope in the next 5-10 years we see browsers that are able to run TypeScript with both runtime enforcement and performance benefits from using actual static typing. But IMO TypeScript is good enough solving most of the type problems with JavaScript.
You’re welcome to use as many or as few libraries as you want. There are tons of JavaScript libraries, and some of those libraries have way too many dependencies. But if you cut through the noise, there are actually a lot of high-quality libraries that don’t have an absurd number of dependencies and bring a lot of value.
JavaScript is by no means perfect, but I think it’s become trendy to hate on it. Every language has its issues. JavaScript has done an amazing job outgrowing many of its problems. Growth has brought new problems, but I’ve been writing JS/TypeScript for 10 years, and would not like to go back to JS 10 years ago. It kind of sucked compared to today.
Try to learn it and you’ll see!
At least if you know programming beforehand.
I’ve been writing JavaScript for 10 years, the majority of that professionally. I have a formal education in computer science. In college, I wrote Java, assembly, C, Python, Lisp, Prolog, and SQL. Outside of school, I’ve written Go, Rust, Ruby, and probably dabbled in a bunch of others.
As someone that knows programming and that has learned JavaScript, I don’t get the sense that people here have actually given JavaScript a fair chance. Sure, it’s not without its issues, but why don’t you learn it and see?
Voyager, which I believe is the most popular Lemmy iOS client, is written in JavaScript. It’s a fantastic app. There are a bunch of people that love hating on JS, but there are also a bunch of people that hate being locked into cloud services that can be shut down at any time. JavaScript allows you to build local-first apps that are less dependent on a server (obviously, backend is still a thing).
Learn C++ or a modern high level language (not Java). You seem stuck in the old stuff which might be why you don’t see the obvious flaws with js.
That a nice program is written in a language says nothing positive about the language IMO. Everything was written in old clunky languages at a certain point.
This
Thanks. I’m building my own Lemmy client and I’m leaning very heavily on JavaScript 😅, but it’s 100% local first, only depending on the Lemmy API.