When I first started to explore the Gemini world I was expecting some crazy visually pleasing experience, more on the lines of crypto websites and whatnot. With that being said when I saw what Gemini looked like I wasn't very excited about it at all. Any shred of interest I had regarding Gemini was lost.
Until I learned more about Gemini throughout my Studies of Digital Culture class the lack of interest was true. Now that I knew more about Gemini I was interested again.
When I thought I was out... THEY PULL ME BACK IN!
After regaining my interest in Gemini I downloaded the Lagrange browser to further my exploration of this digital world. Using Lagrange I found Gemini to be more visually pleasing, which was an important point to me for some reason, and was able to further explore the various communities that habit it.
Gemini on a technical level is an application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format that facilitates linking between files. Gemini is a new way of using the Internet, separate from the World Wide Web. It is often described is as both >the web, stripped right back to its essence as well as Gopher, souped-up and modernized a little.
One of the main things people have been using Gemini for is blogging. And it makes sense because blogs are mostly text, it’s easy to find updates, and the web has made a real mess of it, where it hasn’t completely abandoned it to social media.
You can subscribe to different types of feeds that pick your interest. But to find feeds to subscribe to, you’re going to need to use a feed aggregator. You can also search Gemini, just like you can search the web. However, it’s not indexed by Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo; we have our own search engines. Or rather, search engine. There have been three search engines built for Gemini, but only one is currently active: geminispace.info.
Well, there’s no direct equivalent of the WWW’s social media sites on Gemini. Gemini doesn’t have a built-in method for posting things, so most people posting on Gemini right now are using separate tools to write their pages or posts and to upload them to a server. Personally, I use Gemlog.Blue, which is a site that makes it easy to maintain a gemlog. You can register on the WWW side of the site, and create, edit, or delete posts through the web interface, and view them through Gemini. People can subscribe to a feed of your posts. I'm using Gemlog. Blue while writing this post!
The first aspect of Gemini I got into was geminispace.info which is a search engine for content served over the Gemini Protocol. It provides both a search interface, so you can look for content within Geminispace by keywords, content types, content sizes, and more. It also provides data on the size and characteristics of Geminispace itself. It is the only search engine for Gemini. It felt like a hacker's google. I say hacker because of the way Gemini looks, all text and with a computery, for lack of a better word, font. I used geminispace.info to browse the Gemini world. Anything I found while exploring, was found thanks to geminispace.info. If anything I found geminispace.info to be almost as useful as google and more calming to use for some reason. I find it more efficient considering that Google uses images and other types of media.
On a technical aspect Antenna is a feed aggregator with a twist. It doesn't have a list of feeds that it repeatedly checks. Instead, it takes feed URLs as user input and puts them in a queue. The queue is checked every ten minutes, and an attempt to ingest each feed is made. Once a feed has been ingested it's removed from the queue and thus forgotten. In simpler terms, Antenna is an aggregator of feed entries from around Geminispace. The feed aggregator only polls feeds when they've been updated. I found Antenna to be another fun way to explore Gemini. Unlike geminispace.info you can't search, which makes it more entertaining to explore Gemlogs.
Gemini is a great and huge world that anyone can explore. It can truly be described as the internet in its purest form. There are many other aspects of Gemini that I could talk about, however, I only talked about what I'm familiar with the most, Gemlogs, Geminispace, and Antenna. This is what I mostly looked into while exploring Gemini and its communities. I highly recommend to explore Gemini and be part of its various communities.