Gemini

Gemini protocol has been trending on my Mastodon homeserver Fosstodon quite a bit lately. Some term it as the spiritual successor to Gopher protocol. Originally developed by Solderpunk (cool name btw!), it’ something in between Gopher and HTTP (the modern web). By design, free from any JavaScript, analytics, tracking, advertisers for now (and probably search engine crawls too). Niche it feels like, just like what Mastodon felt (and sometimes now also), a place where geeks and nerd flock, technical to it’s core. Browsing Gemini (through Amfora and Lagrange) feels like the small, personal text oriented culture from the 80-90s internet era (which I didn’t experience firsthand because was born late, but know about newsgroups, BBS etc). It houses all kinds of interesting stuff like gemlogs (blogs in Gemini space), games like tic-tac-toe, search engine and even a Gemini exclusive mixtape (highly recommended) capsule.

As my blog is mostly text oriented, with no JavaScript, no tracking with only one external call to CDN for CC license image (which I’ll load locally soon enough), Gemini seems a good choice for having a presence on (with a gemlog). I’m presently experimenting with Gemini servers and seeing how things work. With no inline links (which I heavily rely on), direct conversion of my previous blogs into gemlogs won’t work out nicely. Hoping to have my posts on both web and Gemini space. ASCII art in the Gemini space fascinates me, will surely have that on my Gemini capsule. Will announce when the capsule goes live.

PS - My blog loads nicely in terminal browsers \o/. Any users say hi!