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I write this post in the living room of my current home, half-listening to conversation going on in the background. As my family members discuss various topics I listen to a tape from KONPEITO and glance at my Astrobotany garden from time to time to keep my spirits up. Occasionally I stop writing for long stretches at a time, simply thinking about what words to write next. The relative slowness of typing compared to thinking is a blessing and a curse, as it allows me to slow down and pick words carefully but makes it hard to plan out a full paragraph at a time.
If you've ever written longform content of any sort, this scenario probably sounds familiar to you. There is a certain experience inherent to sitting down and putting down your thoughts, and that experience can be different depending on the medium you're writing for. If you're writing a formal paper, you constantly refer back to your notes and try to keep the appropriate tone the full way through. Writing posts for a longform roleplay can be an experience as chaotic as it is rewarding, and when the game is going well it rarely feels like work. And when it comes to writing content for a blog, there's almost a sense of conversation with an unseen listener.
And then you have the feeling of writing a blog in a small corner of the small web. Gemini is an excellent platform for publishing your thoughts onto the internet, and it feels more akin to writing a forum thread than posting onto Tumblr and more intimate than putting together a website somewhere like Neocities. Gemini is a wonderful and wonderfully small protocol. The limitations both intentional and inherent call back to a simpler time in the history of the internet and deliver an experience rarely felt today.
My general thesis on the nature of writing for a website is based on an oversimplification, but it's a useful one. Broadly, I believe websites are composed of two interconnected elements: content, and presentation.
"Content" is of course the body of a page. The information being shown to the viewer in its purest form. Content is the words in an article, the images in a picture gallery, the game on a store page, the music in an album. "Presentation" is the form it takes before the viewer can see it. It's the choice of background and font in a blog or news site, the interface which allows you to scroll through artwork, the small box where you can play a game in the browser, the interactive track list on an album listing.
Content and presentation are inextricably linked. The overall experience of browsing a website is dependent on both, as the content gives meaning to the page around it and the presentation makes the content more accessible and can lend it further weight. Often the way a page is presented is itself the content, and just as often it's the only reason the content is possible. Consider how boring an interactive splorts viewing experience like Blaseball might be if viewers could only read a transcript of the game after it ended rather than being able to see the players triumph in real time.
What I find fascinating is that the complete lack of presentation can itself be another form of presentation.
Gemini is unique in that the concept was designed purely for the purpose of being as simple as possible while still allowing text to have a certain level of formatting. The way a line should be rendered is decided as early as the first character, and writers only have the bare minimum options. The ability to fully render gemtext in a few hundred lines of code is a wonderful upside of this design strategy, but there are other interesting consequences that derive from it.
The Gemini protocol is, essentially, devoid of presentation. A Gemini page is just as readable in plaintext as it is in gemtext, and the final decision about what it should look like depends entirely on the browser. Some browers are incredibly simple and can fit confidently within the limitations of a terminal emulator, and some browsers take it upon themselves to impress further structure on the document.
The browser I use is Lagrange, which I believe to be an excellent choice for anyone who wants a cross-platform browser that simply works. It too is simple, written with minimal tools and requiring minimal resources, but despite this it has a number of features drawn and inspired from modern HTML browsers. Some of these, such as the randomly generated (but changable by the user) single-character favicons and color themes, serve mainly to make pages look nicer than just black text on a white background. Others, such as inlining images and media players, actively make reading a page easier.
But despite the potential complexity of a Gemini browser the person creating a capsule doesn't need to worry about any of that, especially if they're writing static pages. From the perspective of the author you don't even need a browser to test your formatting. You can write a capsule entirely from a notepad and be no less informed about what it looks like than your visitors.
Writing a traditional webpage is a long and arduous process. Making everything look the way you want it is tedious and difficult, requiring you to go back and forth editing and testing in a browser, and if you want to ensure the experience is consistent for everyone viewing the page you'll need to test it in multiple. On top of that concepts aren't free, and if you happen to be indecisive or perfectionistic (like I am) deciding on your design can be just as hard as making it a reality.
It's always possible to leave your page un-themed, but doing this invariably leaves the reader with a less than satisfactory experience and still requires the author to deal with HTML's questionable formatting practices. When marking out a paragraph requires the tedious addition of tags it's impossible to simply copy text from your notes directly into a document without having at least a little bit of boilerplate.
On the other hand gemtext's simplicity means it's inherently limited. This makes it so that there are certain things you can't do over Gemini, but despite that it's a classic truism that limitation breeds creativity. Compared to creating a webpage over HTML, hand-writing a capsule is dead easy. Shunting the greater concern of presentation off to the browser and merely worrying about the content means that you're more free to calm down, settle down, and focus on creating. With Gemini, you will never have to worry about setting up a consistent theme and filling out the visuals before you can begin to write content.
Will I continue to use Gemini far into the future? Maybe. There are certain ideas in the back of my mind which require HTML's more complex formatting, but for the moment I simply want to focus on writing content. At the very least I plan to mirror posts between the two if/when the time comes.
I write this post on the final day of a self-imposed deadline, multiple weeks after I first intended to start working on it. If I had to construct an HTML website first I would never have started writing it at all. Gemini has a worthy place as a companion for the clearnet. Never a replacement, but always a simpler option for simpler purposes.
__________________ Have any thoughts about pure-content publication? Feel free to send me an email.