💾 Archived View for envs.net › ~pen › gemini › popular.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:00:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Popularity of Gemini

IMHO, Gemini is surprisingly popular. How come?

If I remember correctly I came accross Gemini via a blog post by a well known author I had in my feed reader. The post also appeared on Hackernews, I think.
Wikipedia articles in multiple languages
Articles in (online editions of) IT magazines
Talk at FOSDEM 2021 (also 2022?)
Lagrange in Fedora Repos

Still, Gemini is not ubiquitous of course, which is nice.

Do we want it to become much more popular, or stay the niche it still is? How popular would we want it to be? Should we be able to …

post a gemini:// URL on the Fediverse
or even on the other Social Networks
or e-mail Gemini links not only to known Geminauts but any friends or relatives

… and get meaningful responses, maybe even trigger further Gemini posts?

Would we want to see Wikipedia rendered as Gemini per gemini://en.wikipedia.org?

How would infoboxes, tables, inline links, footnotes, references work/look like? Well, let's have a look at gorgeous encyclopedia.marginalia.nu or

gemini://vault.transjovian.org/text/en/Gemini%20(protocol)

Would we want to read general news articles via Gemini?

German taz.de is quite nice, how could it work for other news sites, that currently are not even accessible when trying to avoid trackers? Old monetization discussion …

The year of Gemini on my Desktop

Interesting thoughts by jdd

The first thing that would happen, I think, is that it would collapse into the web, much as gopher did in the 1990s. If major web browsers ever added support for the gemini protocol, if major search engines started indexing gemini space ... it would be pretty much game over in terms of maintaining gemini as its own thing, distinct from the web. If you could transit between the web and gemini space seamlessly, gemini capsules would become little more than curiously retro-looking web sites. And how long do you think it would be until web browsers started supporting non-standard markup in gemini pages? You know, to better allow you to monetize your content by including a few ads and some tracking cookies?

gemini://gem.sdf.org/jdd/posts/20220312-desktop.gmi

Support of Gemini protocol in Web browsers

This would come alongside support of the media type text/gemini.

Firefox removed FTP support, though, so why should they add Gemini …

Support of text/gemini in Web browsers

At least I then would expect that Web browsers also support Markdown and AsciiDoc and others, too. Would this lead to more (personal) text-focused sites like blogs again?

Hmm, with publishing an HTML version of our Gemini capsules there's hardly an incentive for native Gemtext (and protocol) support in browser engines.

Search engines indexing Gemini space

Caching all, disregarding robots.txt?

Search engines (and CDNs?) delivering Gemini content

Delivering (cached) Gemini content as XHTML via HTTPS via searches. Remember AMP content served by Google, arguing it's merely a proxy … Users wouldn't leave the Google realm, as is the case with their "knowledge graph" fed by Wikipedians.

Gemini only as retro-looking sites caught in the Web

Non-standard markup mixed in text/gemini

How did others get to know Gemini?

gemini://gemini.hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/2022-03-05-welcome.gmi

Other niches I enjoy

OpenPGP with email, but actually gave up on it within family

Usenet, back again since Big-8 seems more active (or just my appreciation?)

Gopher, only a bit, only since Gemini

Superhighway84, not too much, feels a bit having a too complex stack

Static Site Generators, hmm, only before Gemini now?

P.S. [resolved] Cheers

-- @ 2022-03-13 Initial stub