#+TITLE: Gemini
#+AUTHOR: Yann Esposito
#+EMAIL: yann@esposito.host
#+DATE: [2020-11-09 Mon]
#+KEYWORDS: internet gopher gemini
#+DESCRIPTION: How I discovered gemini
#+OPTIONS: auto-id:t toc:t
#+html_head_extra: <style>body { font-family: Courier, monospace; }</style>

This weekend I read an article about gopher and gemini.
I already seen articles about gemini pass.
Somehow, it was more appealing to me than gopher space for totally
subjective reasons I think.
Anyway this time I really dug into it, and I loved the experience.

At first sight gemini is like a parallel web for nerds.
It has fundamental changes that I would have really liked to see from the
modern web.
The client decide the design, no user tracking, calm, minimalist, simple.

Right now, on the web, most news website make the experience terrible to
read the article.
The page is bloated with a lot of animations, popin asking you to accept
the cookies, ads with videos, strange fonts or design, plenty of
javascript, trackers, etc...

Gemini make those kind of anti-design impractical.
In gemini space there is no:

- CSS: the client decide the look of the page, the fonts, the colors, the
  width of the columns, etc...
- inline image: you can still link to images, but images should not be
  displayed in the middle of the text.
- inline links: If you link to an external resource, it is clearly visible
  as an element on its own line.
- cookies
- HTTP headers used to track users
- scripts on the client side
- hard to parse format (no HTML, XHTML, etc...)

Another strength of Gemini is its protocol's simplicity.
It is easy to write your own gemini server as well as your own gemini
client within a few hours of work in your programming language of choice.

And last but not least, gemini is unfit to serve "big" files.
So we should not experience people going to gemini for music/movie piracy.
If you want to serve "big" files you should use another protocol.

Personally I started to browse gemini directly from emacs with elpher.
But I know there are a lot of clients.

I liked gemini so much I hacked my blog to also publish in the gemini sphere.
I serve my pages with a rust based server.
And I hacked a quick script to transform my org mode files to gemini format.
Gemini file format is a kind of super simplified markdown.
I really like the simplicity of it.

Here are a few links to get you started.

Web:

- [[https://gemini.circumlunar.space][gemini homepage]]
- [[https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/][elpher emacs gopher and gemini client]]
- [[https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/][Explore gemini from the web]]

Gopher:

- [[gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/projects/elpher/][elpher]]

Gemini:

- [[gemini://her.esy.fun][my website in gemini]]
