I think calling gemini an alternative to the web has a very limited view of the web. It takes an idea someone has of what the web should be: a set of text documents. That's a very small subset of the web, not just of today.
Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection. But I'm not convinced that has many advantages besides not being accidentally linked to a websited of the "Old web." A problem that could be reduced by a browser extension that strictly blocks any external urls and javascript.
The separate protocol for everything is essentially what things were like prior to about 1994.
There was a protocol for searching documents, a protocol for looking up someone's email, it was all partitioned out.
The web was seen as just another fish in the pond.
After the web became big, these things still lasted for a while
However spam and crooks changed it all. Usenet became useless, DNS full domain lookups (you used to be able to get a list of all the subdomains of a domain through the command line and you could just browse then out of curiosity), using whois for email (you could just query for a name and get an email address over whois), it's all gone because there's too many snakes trying to scam people and flood the network.
Things used to be much better tools but it turns out they were too good and had no defenses. The dream of everybody connecting has sort of been retracted a bit. RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.
It's not the case any more. Not even minor players in history (such as an author from a 25 year old book) respond to my questions. People just don't do that anymore.
Spam, harassment, criminals, ill will, this all has to be a big priority if we want to try it again.
The future should be the dreams of our better angels, building better tomorrows...
> RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.
I don't think this stopped just because of spam, harassment, or other bad behavior. A big part of it is just community size. When the community of internet users was smaller, you could interact with everyone who reached out in a reasonable amount of time. As it got bigger, that is no longer possible because of the sheer number of people.
This is an exceptionally good point. Security is also one of the top problems with the web (alongside the asymmetrical difficulty of hosting content vs consuming it and the lack of consistency for web content). The problems with the web are mitigated by "good enough" solutions from browser vendors, out-of-band third party extensions and even some services on the web itself (e.g. archive.org, though I don't know how sustainable that is, and it's far from perfect).
Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection. But I'm not convinced that has many advantages besides not being accidentally linked to a websited of the "Old web." A problem that could be reduced by a browser extension that strictly blocks any external urls and javascript.