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2020-06-13
Happy Whatever the 13th!
So I've been dinking around on gemini for a couple of days now and I wanted to jot down some thoughts and first impressions.
When I was thinking about writing this, I realized I was thinking about it mostly in terms of as a comparison to gopher. I am by no means a gopher power user, but I have a gopherhole on tilde.town, and I used to update the one I have on circumlunar. (Note to self: I should really revive my circumlunar gopherhole because I loved it, and I loved that community.)
dozens on circumlunar (gopher)
But anyway, I've written enough and read enough gopher content that I have opinions.
So the things I love about Gemini, as far as first impressions go, are the Gemini filetype, and TLS.
The gemini filetype itself is lightyears of improvement on gopher because of its (ultra light) markup.
Its primary features for me are:
1. Hyperlinks
2. Text Wrapping
Most gopher content I've read mixes content with links, which is kind of against the philosophy of gopher. Gopher purists would just have directories of files and that's it. Plain text files might contain plain text links to other content that the reader is then responsible for copying and pasting into a browser, or otherwise managing on their own. This is a pretty poor user experience.
And so for most phloggers, every file is a gophermap. A gopher map in a dir, so that you can mix content and links. Which technically is kind of a hack
So just creating a way for people to officially do what they've already been doing is super duper.
I've often wanted to browse gopher content on mobile, but the preformatted content and the hard coded line breaks is usually broken on small screens. Baking it into the spec that all paragraphs are one line and should be rendered by the client allows for HTML browser like rendering of the content, which means that not-broken mobile browsing is finally possible!
For example, I was just browsing CAPCOM on my phone earlier and found a cool esperanto transliteration project
Foobaz - Automatic Esperanto transliteration
I love document structure. My ideal gemini client will parse all the headers of a document and have them open in a "table of contents" style side panel for quick-nav.
I think this is just a really cool feature and I'm excited to see what the community does to leverage authentication to provide content. I think the "Astro Botany" example Tomasino demonstrated in his "What is gemini?" video just scratches the surface of what is possible.
What is Gemini? (http) (peertube)
I think gemini is swell and neato! I hope it continues to gain traction and draw interest. The mailing list is crazy busy. I hope that's predictive of staying power.
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