Gemini protocol

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The Gemini protocol is an alternative to HTTP with similar use-cases, with intentional consideration of privacy and security, that could be an alternative way to serve an IndieWeb site.

Marketing Summary

From the Project Gemini FAQ "What is Gemini?":

You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective.

Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to weight ratio", while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a "do it yourself" computing ethos. For this last reason, Gemini is technically very familiar and conservative: it's a protocol in the traditional client-server request-response paradigm, and is built on mature, standardised technology like URIs, MIME media types, and TLS.

A person can start a Geminispace and host if from a low-end device at home.

Gemini sites are called "capsules" and are hosted by Gemini protocol servers.

To access Gemini sites with current web browsers an Web-to-Gemini proxy is necessary.

Software

There are dedicated servers and clients available for many platforms.

Past Projects

Flounder: http://web.archive.org/web/20201128195017/https://sr.ht/~alexwennerberg/flounder/ actual link https://sr.ht/~alexwennerberg/flounder/ is 404 since 2022-09-02 or earlier.
^ source code can now be found on https://git.alexwennerberg.com/flounder/

Gemtext Format

The preferred hypertext used on gemini capsules and associated with the protocol is gemtext (See spec).

Gemtext has no inputs and only 6 type of lines:

Text lines
Link lines (=>)
Heading lines (#, ## or ###)
List lines (*)
Quote lines (>)
Preformatted block lines (```)

While the server surrenders a lot of control regarding what and how it can present in a gemtext page, it actually sees the benefit on focusing on the actual content of the text, leaving less time devoted to the look or behavior of the page.

The protocol can serve any format (sending a mimetype in the reponse before the binary content).

Gemlog is the term used by capsule owners for blogs in Gemini.

Publication

Aggregators will collect new gemlog posts, which can also be served as Atoms feeds.

The platform has search engines dedicated to finding content on Gemini sites.

Specifications

Examples

Hosting

Gemlog.blue provides a quick and easy way for people to keep a gemlog (journal) over the gemini protocol

Aggregators

CAPCOM