I'm so happy to have learned about Gemini. I had heard about it some time in the past year, I think through some writings about the small web, but it didn't click for me at the time. Then I learned about germinal[1]. I was lucky to have been recently sucked into common lisp through stumpwm, the window manager. I wanted to deploy a common lisp app to a remote server and here was my chance.
The gemini HTTP proxies were great gateways, but even they didn't quite get me there. I was still stuck in the browser, and I couldn't understand the value of plaintext when it was adjacent to the intense, hypnotic media collage of the modern web. But once I got out of the browser, it clicked big time. The small web. A labyrinth of hidden treasures.