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My presence on the small Web is almost exclusively on Gemini, and I mostly browse capsules in Geminispace, but every now and then I find myself returning to Gopher. My first experience with small protocols was with Gopher, and while I switch the Gemini almost immediately, I still enjoy exploring phlogs and resources on Gopher.
Part of the enduring charm of Gopher to me is its long-term stability. It's been a staple of the Internet for over three decades, receiving an assignment on port 70 by the IANA. The protocol hasn't evolved significantly since then, meaning any server or client capable of accessing the Internet can still communicate--indeed, several decades-old gopherholes are still online. That stability imbues the community with a rich culture that is easily as accessible as it was in the 1990s.
Gemini carries a lot of the same spirit of simplicity and functionality, but as a protocol it is only a few years old. Many of the earliest capsules are already gone, and many currently-existing capsules are fairly new. Gemini is still in the process of creating its own history and stability. And the people creating that history are not the same as the people who contributed to Gopher's history. I think this results in different approaches to the legacy of Gemini, and indeed in different prospects of the protocol's long-term survival.
Gopher was created in the early 1990s, before the establishment of the World Wide Web. It was not just a new technology, but a new kind of technology: the ability for servers to interact with each other in a directory-like fashion that mirrored local directories on a computer. This was a new paradigm in the popular conscience, if a relatively old one in computer networking, and I'm sure contributed to Gopher's fast growth in the early '90s.
Gemini, on the other hand, is a "middle protocol" between Gopher and HTTP. It isn't fundamentally new in the way Gopher was. It seems to me that many of its adopters come from a place of frustration with the state of the modern Internet, and relatively few come from the world of Gopher with an idea of exploring its expanded capabilities over the Gopher protocol.
A common pitfall of communities is to be united in opposition to something else. If a group has nothing bringing them together but frustration at an outside phenomenon, then if that phenomenon changes or ceases to exist, the community falls apart as well. I don't want that to happen to Gemini. As such, I feel it may not be good for the long-term health of Geminispace to try to make the protocol appealing only or primarily to those who dislike the modern Web.
Temporary frustration leads to temporary presence in a community. This has happened many times already on Gemini, when people create accounts on Station or register for personal capsules on Flounder, only to make one post or gemlog about the horrible state of the Internet and never interact with the community again. The novelty of Gemini attracts interest, but when its only novelty is "it's not social media", interest dies out rather quickly.
I'd like to see Gemini retain an active (if small) community, just as Gopher has all these years. I think it would be pretty cool for our kids or grandkids to explore the same space their parents or grandparents did. The larger Web has completely recycled its content (and technologies) many times over since the last generation, but with the steadfast bedrock of Gemini's specification, we can build something much more long-lasting. We just have to make it worthwhile.
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[Last updated: 2024-10-06]