Johan Bové

Why do I believe Gemini is great for personal Internet presences? First of all, it's a real grass-roots initiative which I am very excited about.

If you're reading this, chances are high you are already using Gemini. But for history reasons and to share my opinions of Gemini I would like to offer you here some views of mine.

Collecting some of the strong-points of Gemini from my perspective of having some experience with Gopher and running personal websites.

Fast and lightweight

• It's very easy on the system resources. So the protocol works really well on slower hardware without any problems. Hosting on a Raspberry Pi3 is easy-peasy.
• Since there are no fancy design in Gemini capsules, it is really optimized for low bandwidth.
• It should work really fine on a feature-phone, like for KaiOS. I don't believe there is a client yet for KaiOs at this time.
• It's fairly easy to build clients and servers for the protocol.

Simple yet complete

• The specifications provide enough functionality to do basically what you would expect to be able to do online.
• Much lower learning curve compared to Gopher and HTML. You can start publishing Gemini pages within minutes.
• Even-though the syntax is limited, it still gives enough playroom for creative expression.
• Use of TLS certificates promises security and privacy.
• It is more international than US-centric Gopher.
• The procol supports the UTF-8 character set so any language can be used to publish sites in.
• This should help make the protocol more popular in non-ascii wielding regions in the World.

Easy to publish

• Content will be probably first of all stored in static text files which are future-proof and easy to maintain.
• Many servers already available that require minimal technical skills.
• Yes, you still need a server, but there are many collectives which you can join to facilitate this.

Focus

• No popups, animations, videos, sound effects.
• Focus on actual content instead of fluff and effects.
• No advertisemens and commercial tracking.
• No Facebook, Google or Twitter.

Accessible

• Power of formatting goes into the clients or readers. Like in the good old days of the early Web, people are expected to style the content to their own liking.
• It's pure text, has simple navigation rules, so should be great for people with disabilities.
• No JavaScript so you really see what you get.

And on top of this, the young Gemini community is driven to make this a success!

I'm sold.

ps. I published this first in plain text on my Gemini capsule and now that I copy paste this into a HTML document I can really tell just how easy it is to publish on Gemini.

My mom's brother Werner only became 41. He died on December 26, 1995 after a short intense battle with lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker. I remember him mostly as a DJ and a computer wizard. I remember he had boxes full of diskettes filled with early PC games. I wonder now if he posted anything on a BBS at the time or had his own Gopher site or even an early HTML website. I wish he was alive now and could observe how the Internet grew to what it is today and how computing power encreased exponentially. I wish he could be here today so I could share with him what I do a for a living as a Web developer and to be able to share good music. In 1995 I was only 15 years old and was not into PC much yet. Cancer sucks.

I've been spending way too much time on #Gopher servers in the last couple of days.

The Gopher Web is intriguing and fascinating and I totally understand the attraction of an ad-free, cookie-free, not-for-profit, underground(-ish) alternative to today's crowded and over-commericially exploited (according to many) HTTP Web.

It's not super straightforward to access, even-though there are good dedicated free browsers (for all platforms) available that totally support the Gopher protocol.

But I have the feeling that because the Gopher Web is a little harder to access, it is actually part of the attractiveness. Lots of humans tired of the current state of the WWW, who still want to publish
content and share stuff, are finding an alternative, albeit archaic, in the Gopher web.

Setting up a Gopher server wasn't hard either thanks to open-source software from dedicated hobbyist developers.

Formatting plain-text files has been interesting too. It's amazing how much effort some Gopher Hole Phloggers take to create beautiful ASCII art and line-out their paragraphs!

Discovering Phlogs has been an eye-opener and inspiring. There are many Phloggers who are publishing worthwile stories and interesting articles in plain text files in their Gopher holes or gopher burrows.

And I had some fun first-time experiences too playing a funny text-based adventure game called "Lost Pig" (2007) -  it's an interactive story, with lots of funny dialogue and plenty of character which by itself is also proof that Gopher pages can also be entertaining.

The Floodgap Gopher (Gopher proxy) site is a great place to start.