I wrote recently about blocking images and videos on the web, trying to reduce the web to a trickle. It was weird and rocky at first, establishing that new way of internetting but I think I’ve fallen into the swing of it finally, and just wanted to mark down some notes about it.

I haven’t had a lot of time to explore it lately, but I’ve been interested in gemini:// protocol for this because stylistically it’s more or less what I want. It’s just that there’s not a terribly large amount of content on it yet (possibly never will be, but who knows). And what I want is to basically be able to “geminize” websites which are not actually on the protocol, reducing them to their bare text components, like in Firefox Reader View, and eliminating images and videos, except places I want or need them: Google Image Search, Amazon, Youtube, my blog, a handful of other sites – and that’s it. Everywhere else I’m categorically blocking images and videos. And it’s going just fine, as I prep for switching over to an e-ink screen as well.

One thing that’s interesting about Gemini is that it it is not that it does not handle images. It actually does, but you cannot it seems put them in line with text in an HTML or Markdownish way. You instead see them as image links, which you can go and click through to to view. I don’t understand it well technically yet, but I ended up kind of emulating that with my Firefox setup to counter-balance the Image Video Block extension, which either is on or off for a domain, and which if you want to just temporarily view images, and then ban the domain again, it ends up with a lot of clicking and its annoying.

Instead what I do now is use another extension called Incognito This Tab for any site that I don’t want to add to my permanent allow-list but want to temporarily “exfiltrate” image data from into my eyeballs. It works great, isn’t a ton of extra clicking, and lets me keep images at arms distance instead of all up in my face constantly. I can go to them on my terms, instead of having random streams of images constantly trying to manipualte me in some direction or another.

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