3d ago

The Gemini protocol, a lighter alternative to the web's HTTP

The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it's barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.

Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It's self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.

Of course, you'll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.

36 comments

I would consider renaming it so people don't think it's AI
- Gemini protocol: 2019, Gemini crap machine: 2023. Google can change the name if they want.
  
  Well yes but good luck.
  
  The swastika was around wayy before the nazis started using it! They should change!!
- What if that's what the corpos want?
  "Oh it's the Tiniverse protocol now? Well check out Apple's new Tiniverse microblogging product!"
- I think you're AI, maybe you should rename yourself.
  
  In order to be artificial intelligence you need to be both artificial and intelligent, and I truthfully am neither

You can just scrap the protocol and serve plaintext, or with just basic html tags like bold , links etc if you want to, works with any navigator.
What is the benefit of using a special navigator?
I'm asking because I think the idea kind of neat, and I'm working on something similar.
- Because it was designed on purpose to not even have the ability to be enshittified. No scripting engine, on purpose -- no popup ads. No cookies, no tracking.
  Things that were originally thought as good things to add to the browser in retrospect have been abused so much, it's better to not have them available for mis-use.
  
  The issue is the structures motivating companies to enshittify. Not the technology. Blame late stage capitalism not JavaScript.
- I’d love to see support for the protocol baked into the big browsers.
  I really think we missed an opportunity to have an app:// protocol back in the ’00s instead of trying to kludge HTML into being software.
  Browsers could totally do multiple protocols. I think ftp:// and gopher:// still works on most of them.
  
  Used to -- I think both ftp:// and gopher:// have been removed by the big browsers (eg Chrome and Firefox).
  Can't have competing standards that might let us avoid ads now, can we?
- This is a good question that's often asked about Gemini. The creator addresses this in a part of the FAQ: Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?
  Personally, I find Gemini nice because its utter basicness guarantees that there's no room for the kind of bullshit you might find on the web. Sure, you and some other nerds could make a "friendly HTML" club, but participation is voluntary and there's no way to enforce the rules to keep the pages simple. And how would you know what sites are "friendly" just by looking at the hyperlink? Gemini creates a universe where sites have to be "friendly"; there is no other way.
  
  Fair enough! Good points actually.
  What I have seen with concepts like this is that's infuriatingly hard to start. I tried getting on the rss bandwagon for example and it's just not very user friendly IMO. Is there for example a Gemini search engine?
  Will FF display a Gemini page as text only?
  Where do you hang out and exchange links 😁 ?
- Why not both? There are bridges that automatically convert and serve Gemtext to simple HTML for "regular" browsers.
  In a similar manner, I wrote a set of scripts that takes gemtext source and creates both Gemini pages (by adding headers and footers) and static HTML pages (same but with some web-specific niceties - CSS, even JS snippets)
  (And yes, I really enjoy gemtext markup for its simplicity)

Anyway, here's my contribution to Geminispace, an homage to a legendary Geocities site.
- geocities
  snapshot of IE
  Memory unlocked.

Maaaaan I tried to like Gemini but it's all over the place being a "worse Gopher" of sorts. Not that I wouldn't adopt it if it garnered more attention, but I feel like it's made for pubishing "yellow pages", not actual content.

36 comments

Memory unlocked.