💾 Archived View for hyperborea.org › log › 2021-03-01-gemini-first-impressions.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 21:09:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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by Kelson Vibber, March 1, 2021
I saw a mention of Gemini today, did some reading, grabbed Ariane for my phone and Lagrange for my computer, and just kind of looked around a bit. And I wanted to see what it would take to set up a basic Gemini server on my domain. It was easier than I expected to just run Agate on my VPS.
It reminds me a lot of the early web, back when I first encountered it in 1994 and was just as likely to call it "the World Wide Web" or "Mosaic." Only without images. And my first impressions of gemlogs are that they're a lot like the early blogosphere, again without media. And comments seem really hacky, especially since the protocol and file format are deliberately designed without forms!
I mean, I sort of get it: creating a system that *can't* be commercialized like the web has been, that *can't* be turned from a hypertext document platform into a software delivery platform. Something bare-bones that won't overload, well, *everything*.
And yet...
A couple of months ago I converted one of my blogs from WordPress to a statically-built site using Eleventy. I went super-minimal. Limited images, no tracking, no scripts at all, very simple markup and styles. You can already do this on the web. So I'm not sure, at least yet, what the benefit is of creating a parallel network with barriers to access.
Re-Reading Les Misérables, the blog I converted
Update (Mar. 21): I've converted it to Gemini too.
I guess I'll have to mess around with it a bit and see what else there is to see.
Next: A Few Days in Gemini Space (♊)