2024-12-01
I'm excited to announce version 0.1.0 of geminauts. Geminauts is a service which allows for anyone to easily create their own capsule. Since this is the first time I have really talked about the project, I want to give you an introduction of what we do, how you can use it, and how it works.
Gemini space has had one particular problem since its conception: Everyone here is too technical. Because of how relatively new gemini is, it is pretty easy to get a client and browse the space, but it is more difficult to create your own space. You need to know how to setup a server which is a high barrier of entry for non-technical people. Pretty much everyone who has their own domain is technically minded in some way and to lower this barrier of entry, we need to make it easier to create content on gemini.
I can't disregard the hard work that has already been made to make gemini a better place for creating content.
gemlog.blue I think is one of the first gemini blogging services which use http to upload content
station is the first to have microblogging all within gemini.
Geminispace is a bulletin board system with subspaces all within gemini.
These are all great places that you should absolutely use. They each have their own strengths. My goal with geminauts is to fill a niche that all of these services cannot. I want to give people the opportunity to create their own capsules with their own domains and give them the power to put what ever they want on their capsule.
Geminauts is accessible completely through gemini. All you need to do is create an account, of which an email is required.
You can create your account here.
Once you have your account created, you can create a capsule. Capsules have at least one domain name. `<capsule>.geminauts.com`. If you don't like this name and have a domain already registered, you can link your domain to your capsule and use that instead of the geminauts one.
You can create your capsule here.
There is currently a limit of 1 capsule per account with 1Mb per file and 1Gb per capsule.
Once you have created a capsule, you can start uploading to the capsule using the titan protocol. Make sure you use a certificate that has been linked with geminauts.com.
Currently geminauts is run all from a single VPS server. A custom built servers have been made which handles all of the gemini/titan requests. Each capsule gets their own DNS record which could allow for distributed servers in the future, but for now everything goes to the same machine.
Capsule files are stored in the cloud using Backblaze's B2 service. Since my server has a very small amount of storage space, it makes more sense to store all the data in the cloud and cache the files that are actually being viewed. I've found that opening a file that has not yet been cached on the server takes about a half second longer than pre-cached files.
There isn't much more to the system since this first version is meant to be fairly bare bones.
I have plans for more features that you can take a look at here.
I've tried to squash as many bugs as possible, but since the codebase is very rugged in places, I'm sure there are going to be some oversights or edge cases that I missed. Please tell me what's wrong or what could be improved!
Geminauts is hosted on source hut and has a mailing list as well as an issue tracker.
You can email me directly at contact@geminauts.com
Or email the mailing list at ~ttocsneb/geminauts@lists.sr.ht