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Gemini

author: Yann Esposito

email: yann@esposito.host

gpg

date: [2020-11-09 Mon]

keywords: internet gopher gemini

description: How I discovered gemini

This weekend I read an article about gopher and gemini.

I already seen articles about gemini pass.

Somehow, it was more appealing to me than gopher space for totally

subjective reasons I think.

Anyway this time I really dug into it, and I loved the experience.

At first sight gemini is like a parallel web for nerds.

It has fundamental changes that I would have really liked to see from the

modern web.

The client decide the design, no user tracking, calm, minimalist, simple.

Right now, on the web, most news website make the experience terrible to

read the article.

The page is bloated with a lot of animations, popin asking you to accept

the cookies, ads with videos, strange fonts or design, plenty of

javascript, trackers, etc...

Gemini make those kind of anti-design impractical.

In gemini space there is no:

CSS: the client decide the look of the page, the fonts, the colors, the

width of the columns, etc...

inline image: you can still link to images, but images should not be

displayed in the middle of the text.

inline links: If you link to an external resource, it is clearly visible

as an element on its own line.

cookies
HTTP headers used to track users
scripts on the client side
hard to parse format (no HTML, XHTML, etc...)

Another strength of Gemini is its protocol's simplicity.

It is easy to write your own gemini server as well as your own gemini

client within a few hours of work in your programming language of choice.

And last but not least, gemini is unfit to serve "big" files.

So we should not experience people going to gemini for music/movie piracy.

If you want to serve "big" files you should use another protocol.

Personally I started to browse gemini directly from emacs with elpher.

But I know there are a lot of clients.

I liked gemini so much I hacked my blog to also publish in the gemini sphere.

I serve my pages with a rust based server.

And I hacked a quick script to transform my org mode files to gemini format.

Gemini file format is a kind of super simplified markdown.

I really like the simplicity of it.

Here are a few links to get you started.

Web:

gemini homepage

elpher emacs gopher and gemini client

Explore gemini from the web

Gopher:

Gemini: