💾 Archived View for tsyesika.se › gemlog › 2023-07-29-hello-geminispace.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:44:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
So I'm late to the party, Gemini started in June 2019 and apparently had some explosion of usage during the Covid-19 pandemic due to being posted on HackerNews with some success. Here we are in July 2023, nearly August and I'm finding out about Gemini. Better late then never though :)
It's not quite fair to say I was 100% in the dark, I knew something called Gemini existed and I had seen it vaguely mentioned in context, but never looked into it. I knew it was some kind of protocol, maybe I could have told you it was... something something... gopher? Yeah, so not exactly familiar.
Then recently I've seen seeing some posts and discussions around simple web and my ears prick up. I personally find the web as we know it today, a mixture of increadibly important and "this is what's wrong with modern computing". The web to me is perpetually threatened by it's complexity and thus reliance on the few modern web browser implementations there actually are (2.5, Firefox and blink based, half points to webkit). This while not great would be at least not a dire threat if browser usage was roughly equally split between them, but alas Firefox has 2.8%.
While I'm writing this, Google (company behind blink) are trying to introduce DRM to webpages - cheers for that!, if you're reading this from the future, I hope they've failed, we need them fail. The web suffers from all other kinds of awful too:
Don't get me wrong, the web isn't all bad, but a lot of why it's good, is because it's popular, it has lots of content and a lot of users. It's not inherit in the technology. The web also was origionally designed for users to be producing content, that's simply not how the modern web tends to work. Neadless to say, The web might want to look elsewhere for it's next ambassidor.
Okay, I am not the best person to answer this. I'm still finding my footing but, Gemini is a protocol focused on serving documents, usually text based documents. It has some of the properties the web started out with, some simple markup with links to other documents elsewhere on the internet. When I say simple I mean the documents have:
These documents, like this one you're reading now, lend themselves to hand editing more so than even markdown or other popular markup formats. The protocol which serves them is designed to be simple, implementable where each document is delivered to your Gemini browser and the user gets to choose how and when to read these.
The protocol isn't just this fancy (or not fancy, I guess) Gemini text, it can serve other kinds of documents like PDF, images, sound, etc. but these are their own documents, these are not inline, the user must elect to go to them and they can interact with them how they wish.
Here's the Gemini FAQ, it explains it better.
So, the why do I care bit?
Is it going to replace the web? Nope. It doesn't need to in order to be a useful tool. If you've not checked it out, I recommend you do, Lagrange is a good browser, but many others exist. Here's what this page looks in Lagrange to me:
