🚀 What is Gemini?
Gemini is a new minimilistic internet protocol which values the user's reading experience over all else. In other words it's a new, alternative web.
At its core, browsing gemini feels very much like the web you're familiar with: you enter a URL into the browser, and the browser displays the content at that URL to you. Where gemini and the web differ is in the user experience.
Gemini encourages a slower pace of web browsing, centered around text rather than images and video. To understand what browsing gemini feels like, look no further than this page: all text and links, extremely fast, with no bells-and-whistles. Gemini users prefer the experience of reading a well-written article or journal entry over a big, interactive, media-rich social media feed.
Some of gemini's other nice features include:
- Huge diversity of content and people, all brought together by a shared ideal.
- Pages are written in a minimal markup language, called "gemtext", that anyone can learn and use.
- Extremely low resource requirements, so browsing is super fast even on low-powered hardware and bad internet.
- No remembering passwords! Secure, password-less authentication is built right into the protocol.
And of course, it wouldn't be a new internet without all new terminology.
- The gemini equivalent of a website is called a "capsule".
- The gemini equivalent of "the web", ie all the capsules which are publicly available, is called "gemspace" or "geminispace".
- A gemini user is occasionally called a "geminaut".
Gemspace is, at present, much less populated than the web, but it's far from empty. Lots of people host their own capsule, either at home or at some hosting provider, and fill it with whatever they find interesting. There are also various aggregators which show the latest posts people have made across gemspace, as well as a handful of messageboards. There's space to interact with others and space for self-expression, and lots of overlap between.
Blast Off! The Tour
Blah blah blah. It's easy to talk about something, but it's hard to understand without experiencing it. Everyone loves a tour (right?), so let's go!
Install a Gemini Browser (optional)
The best place to start is by downloading a gemini browser. Lagrange is the most popular one, and has the widest support.
Once installed I encourage you to return to this page, but this time in gemspace! You can do so by inputting this URL into the gemini browser's URL bar:
gemini://mediocregopher.com/gemini.gmi
If you don't want to install a new thing I totally get that. You can keep reading this like normal, and all gemini links will be routed through a gateway which will render the capsules' content in your web browser.
First Stop: Gemini Project Homepage
The first stop on everyone's gemini voyage is always the gemini project's homepage.
Here you'll find the actual technical specs for the gemini protocol and gemtext markup language, but more importantly you can find a lot more exposition on what gemini is, who started it, and the reasoning behind it's various design decisions.
The link at "Known Gemini software" page is also very useful for finding alternative gemini clients, if you're disatisfied with Lagrange or want to make sure it doesn't become the defacto standard.
Second Stop: Wherever You Want!
Like all good tours this one will show you all the popular places that everyone knows, plus some local-only gems. Each of these links will lead you down a rabbit hole deeper into gemini. It may be overwhelming, but remember that you don't have to see everything, and that you can't end up in the wrong place. Just browse around and enjoy!
First up we'll check out the feed aggregators. These sites poll capsules from across gemspace looking for recently added pages, and display those in a central place for people to read. You'll find quite a bit of overlap across these, but each has its quirks.
gmisub aggregates all gemlogs which conform to a minimal spec
Antenna can have content submitted by anyone, anytime
CAPCOM picks 100 feeds monthly to act as its content source
My own personal feed of gemini and HTTP pages
Next up we'll check out some capsules which resemble more traditional social media sites. Gemini capsules don't normally have logins. Instead there is a mechanism in the protocol which allows your gemini browser to identify itself to a capsule in a secure way without needing usernames and passwords. These capsules take advantage of this mechanism.
BBS: Bulletin Boards in Geminispace
The Midnight: A virtual pub that lets you write posts and create pages
Station: where capsuleers hang out
Hidden Nexus: A social place in Gemspace!
And finally here's some miscellaneous capsules that don't belong in either of the above categories.
medusae.space gemini directory: A catalog of capsules organised into categories
Fumble Around: gemspace's simplest discovery engine (full-disclosure: I made this)
Only tech on Gemini? Think again!
Gemspace is like an iceberg: surprisingly large under the surface. There's a lot of passion that people have put into the space, and it shows.
Third Stop: Home Sweet Home
Hopefully by now you're interested in properly joining gemspace by propping up a capsule of you're own. Let's see how to do that.
If you're technically minded you can easily serve a gemini capsule on your own domain from your own server. Just check out the "Gemini Software" page on the gemini protocol homepage that I linked to above for a nice list of available server software. I would recommend reading a bit about the protocol itself as well.
For everyone else, luckily, there are publicly available services which allow you to host your content on their servers. The messageboards I listed in the last section would be a great place to start. If you'd like a full blown gemini capsule of your own there are also a few services which will host one for you.
flounder hosts small Gemini web pages over https and Gemini
Gemlog.blue is a journal hosting service for the gemini protocol
Smol Pub is tiny blogging service
Yestercities: A community of people who strongly believe in an internet of user created content
And finally, if you ever forget how to write gemtext, there's a handy cheatsheet on the gemini protocol homepage.
Goodbye to the Web?
I prefer gemini for its openess, its coziness, and its DIY feel, but I will never say that it could replace the web completely. Gemini's simplicity is it's greatest strength, but it also means there will always be things that it simply cannot do, and for those things we have the web.
Earlier I referred to gemspace as being like an iceberg, but it's not alone in that; ye olde internet still has quite a few surprises up its sleeve too. Underneath the lumbering tech giants you can still find a healthy growth of indie blogs, oddball websites, underground communities, and passion. It's just that finding these places is harder, and a lot of them are necessarily a bit defensive about letting outsiders in. I think gemini is great because it gives everyone a taste of what it's like to be part of a healthy online community, and even if they don't stay they can take that experience back with them. Maybe in that way gemini can help make the web a minutely better place too.
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Last Updated: 2024-08-08
Hi! My name is Brian and I'm available for short-term remote contract work. Whether you need a consultant to guide you through a difficult problem or another pair of hands to smash out some code, I can do it all. Learn more about me and my skillset by browsing around this site, head over to my resume to find my actual work history, and shoot me an email when you're ready to get in touch.