By Jeremiah Stoddard on 2022-01-02
I first heard about Gemini a few weeks ago, when a friend brought it up. Neither of us was too interested in it, although we are both unimpressed with the modern web and its sites too full of unnecessary visual noise, media, tracking, scripts, and so on. CSS, Javascript, and multimedia all have their uses, but the amount of it in the web is overwhelming, and in most cases, much more than needed for the content it is served with. It's all show and little substance. Whether or not Gemini is the solution, the problem it attempts to solve is real.
I couldn't get Gemini out of my head, though. I had (and to a degree, have) some of the concerns that are addressed in the Project Gemini FAQ, including questioning the requirement for secure connections, considering that it excludes my old computers (I have an Apple IIe on my desk at home that I still use for typing, games, and even occasional web browsing).
This last week I decided to check out Gemini, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. So I put together a simple, perhaps poorly-designed, Gemini client. I have been using it to browse Geminispace over the last few days, which I have enjoyed. I have to admit that the simplicity of the protocol, which allowed me—who hasn't been a professional programmer in a few years—to put together a client on my own in a couple of days, was really neat.
Well, here is my contribution to the universe of Gemini. Hopefully I will have something interesting to say now and then.