2021-11-08 How did I end up with Gemini?

On the big table, there’s a monitor, for work; and a laptop; and keyboard; a mouse, a microphone, headphones, a notebook, a fountain pen, all for work. At the other end of the table is my wife’s laptop, and folders and stacks of papers: we did taxes in September and haven’t managed to clean it up.

The path that led me to Gemini started with me being unhappy about the web and rediscovering Gopher. I mean, I knew about Gopher – back in 1994 or so I must have gotten an account on the university AIX and with that, access to USENET and Gopher.

When I rediscovered Gopher in 2018, I liked some aspects and hated others.

Simplicity was great!

But what about encryption?

And what about encoding?

I learned not to do as many inline links as I could

What I wanted to change for Gopher: UTF-8, TLS, hang up, “wiki”

What about markup?

What about those terrible Gopher menus?

How simple should a really simply client be?

I was trying to come up with something new, but Solderpunk had the right approach, the right social ties, the right words – and Gemini managed to capture both the faction unhappy with Gopher and the faction unhappy with the web, and here we are.

Bonus:

Titan history

Anyway, just in case you’re interested in why I like Gemini.

​#Gemini

​#Gemini