GoKawiilIn my last post, I announced that I created a bash tool for easier blogging in the terminal, inspired by the tildeverse. Today, I want to continue my discussion on visions of alternative Internets that are already being created.
I want to talk about Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) schemes.
Sounds boring, right? Or at least complicated, but it really isn't. URIs are just the protocols set for browsing the Internet. There are many, some official (as per the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and some unofficial.
One of the biggest draws of the IndieWeb for me is the decentralization of the Internet. The entire point is to stop the erosion of the Internet from being a handful of bad-faith, extractive corporate social media platforms.
But at the end of the day, we're still all using the same Internet, aren't we? The same handful of browsers, the same frameworks and engines. We can take this a step further, and we can interface with the Internet in ways that don't involve going to websites that start with https://
The Colour of What We Call the Internet
Chrome alone controls roughly 73% of global desktop browser market share. If you add in Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, which all are built on Google's Chromium engine, that accounts for over 80% of desktop browsing worldwide. Mozilla, which still maintains one of the only independent rendering engines (Gecko), is the only viable competitor. Everything else is Blink and Google.
More and more, the webdevs of the world test and develop for Chrome only. Agriculture teaches us how dangerous and fragile monocultures like this are.
It doesn't need to be this way. https:// is not the only way to connect and interface with the Internet. Some that you may know are ftp:// for file transfers, mailto: for email composition, ssh:// for secure shell access, irc:// for Internet Relay Chat, or magnet: for peer-to-peer downloads. The majority of Internet browsers do not play nicely even with these protocols, handing them off to other applications.
But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger:// , gopher:// , and gemini:// . Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet. None of them require a GUI. None of them require JavaScript. All three of them run in a terminal.
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