cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/24735701
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
It is similar to the old gopher: text files, links, and images form a hypertext optimized for reading. Text is formatted like Markdown - but even simpler.
Clients display text, like an eBook, or images / media.
Servers can run on a PC or Raspberry Pi which needs half a Watt of power. No FAANG companies needed. No expert knowledge needed - not more difficult than running a file sharing client.
I think it is the right thing for defense of democracy and sharing your voice in the digital realm.
It’s a wonderful protocol, but I’ve noticed way too many gems getting put up and then never being maintained, not just by way of content, but also certificate management isn’t managed so the server is still existing there, but the content is inaccessible.
Is this just yet another gopher protocol? Or does it come with anything interesting
Gopher with certificates.
Wait, gopher didn’t use certificates? What’s wrong with these people? And of course these are going to be just gpg certificates, not authoritative I imagine, or it would defeat the entire decentralised thing.
I really don’t get this stuff. If you want pure text websites, just make them, you are allowed to use pure html, you don’t have to use JavaScript if you don’t want to. You can get real certificates for free from Let’s Encrypt, and you can use any free DNS service you want
gopher predates http, of course it didn’t have certificates.
First of all, they were developed around the same time; second, no one said that a protocol should remain unchanged for 35 years. And lastly, the people in “what’s wrong with these people” are the people pretending gopher is any good today, and a reasonable alternative to the web, which factually isn’t the case as apparently it did remain unchanged for 35 years. And if it didn’t remain unchanged but did not add certificates, it would just make things look even worse.
it’s been unchanged because http got more popular.
there is a vocal part of the indieweb that does not want encrypted communication because it increases the system requirements, and because it disincentivises sending sending any sensitive information. i don’t really agree with that assessment but i do think there is something to not sending stuff you don’t need.
Clients display text, like an eBook, or images / media.
Is this new? Last I checked on Gemini, it could only to text, unless you count ASCII art as images.
It can transmit any media or mime type. It just does this one document at a time.
Clients can display linked images inline of course.
The purpose of this and other limitations is to make it useless for advertising and tracking.
some clients had the ability to parse image links If included in the gemtext, but that was client specific.
That’s not ideal. I hope they implemented images in the protocol itself, because having just text is kinda bland.
Images and documents with any MIME type are part of the protocol. Clients decide how they do display that.
That said it is a medium primarily geared at displaying text. Not animated gifs with ads.
I see. Thanks for elaborating.
What’s wrong with http?
I think the better comparison (whether that’s technically accurate or not) is to HTML + CSS + JS. Which is overly complicated for just small blogs and personal webpages etc. I think that’s the “issue” Gemini is trying to solve.
Still not an issue. Just throw out all modern web frameworks and stick to content-focused HTML. You can even do plaintext with unclickable links.
Have you ever seen HTML without CSS? It’s ugly as hell
Or if you like a more readable markup with a very thin markdown layer on either the client or server side.
I think TeX is the right way.
It’s kind of meaningless but very interesting at the same time :D
Just a week ago I put my bog on there: gemini://jeena.net
The thing is also that there was no server available for Ubuntu so it would automatically be updated with the system updates. So instead of keeping it up to date manually, I decided to get some help of a coding agent and we made together a simple static file serving Gemini server which I pu on here: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/pollux
I’m still working on it, especially I want virtual hosts and better parallelism.
I just hope that the time I put in ti Make it secure payed off and nobody hacks my server. Normally I only work on the application layer.
The thing is also that there was no server available for Ubuntu
Debian 12 (and looks like Ubuntu, too) has
molly-brown. I also chose it for being a Debian package instead of additional install.The easiest and possibly most secure server I know of is agate, written in Rust. But there are many implementations to start from…
Yeah, afterwards I actually looked at Agates code specifically to get inspiration for features where I saw the vhost part.
But like the protocol it was fun to just try out if I can implement something useful.
