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.
