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Johan Bové
Johan Bové

Posted on • Originally published at social.johanbove.info on

My reasons to support the Gemini Internet Protocol

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.

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