What if Gemini... was served over P2P rather than TCP/IP? Perhaps the only thing that I really dislike about Gemini is the fact that relies on a Server/Client model, so I need to have a capsule hosted somewhere, and you must connect to my server in order to read it. While it might be more resilient if the Gemini ecosystem was built upon a P2P network, where you host perhaps you capsule and a portion of the Geminiverse, and if you are offline for some reason your capsule is still alive as long someone on the P2P has your mirror (or clone). Client would be mini P2P nodes, and you may decide if serving only the text and not the media... [follow]

1 month ago

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@defaultflavored you must use a blockchain-y method, there should be a parallel mechanism that convalidates who is the original author; otherwise we are just sharing text file that you can browse or altering manually and any time you made a change a new file should be issued through a delta mechanism. · 1 month ago

This is a good idea, but P2P is notoriously hard. My back of the napkin solution would be Freenet over Tor (= anonymous distributed datastore). Freenet has its own issues---not least that it's java, but also its notorious culture--- so we'd have to reimainge it for pure text. Tor already exists and can be leveraged as is. The real complexity comes when Xi is sharing Putin's content to Trump. How does Trump know Xi isn't sending false information, leading to a nuclear war? Now we're in the key distribution problem, which has never really been solved, which is why most P2P is actually semi-centralized. But that sounds okay, too. · 1 month ago

Gemini is an hobby protocol and content itself, as long as is not pubblicly available or advertised, shouldn't fall under any legislative issue. · 1 month ago

Might be worthwhile to figure out how to 'opt-IN' to syncing/seeding various capsules. There might be legal ramifications otherwise, in certain countries. Also, there's content you might not be comfortable seeding/serving. Arguably, this whole package could be in one big app that handled browsing (locally) and syncing (on requested access). To that end, Ithink there are gemini clients that do this already... offpunk maybe does hte offline browsing. Not setting up seed/sync relays. · 1 month ago

I suppose you could have a massive chain of syncthing shares, all of which relayed capsule data back and forth. A browser would then point to local files-that-had-been-synced (there's probably a german word for this). Only the originator of the file would be able to send out new ones to the various others. · 1 month ago

That's a cool idea, especially for resiliency. It seems like it would change the cgi backend of a lot of the cool game/interactive capsules. It would be great for mirroring and updating a set of static files served... somehow. idk what that would look like: a bunch of torrents that seeded/downloaded from a source, then were browsed locally? · 1 month ago

Take a look at the following directions:

Offpunk and Agregore clients, which store page snapshots over BitTorrent/P2P

Reticulum (protocol) with the Micron wrapper · 1 month ago

It wouldn't be Gemini in the flesh but most likely in the spirits, although it should implement some blockchain-like method to preserve the authorship... 🤔 · 1 month ago

P2P and TLS (certificates?) ... probably not. a gemtext file transport P2P could move pages but it's not GEMINI at that point. · 1 month ago

and i thought of gemini over bluetooth. lol. · 1 month ago

Considering also, how much is easy compressing text, the whole Geminiverse might weigh only few hundreds megabyte. With the P2P you shouldn't even need of the TLS since each node/capsule would have already its own unique hashcode (hope to be right on this) . Not sure about retrocompatibility but already the TLS is a big stop for very old hardware... Also you would lower completely the bar because anyone could create its own capsule on its computer or phone. There are details to define better like how do you own your capsule, etc... But the point is the idea to move into the P2P space. What do you think about it? · 1 month ago