Speaking of Gemini...

A week ago I gave my first public talk, on Gemini and other protocols at my regions first Green Software Foundation event (a lot of firsts).

The talk was a short 20 minutes and aimed at users of the internet with no knowledge of protocols.

Based on some interest here, I've put together this document made up from my notes and slides.

The Talk

A protocol is a set of rules. In this context it's the rules governing the comunication between clients and servers.

HTTP is what the web as we know it is built on. It is over 30 years old at this point. It's seen a lot of changes, both in the type of content served on it and the features that the specification allows. It keeps getting bigger.

An average website with 10,000 monthly page views emits about 31.5 kg CO2e (29 kg with green hosting) - website carbon

We can't hope to green host our way out of this problem, we have to change our behaviour.

Whats the better alternative:

finger

1970s - used for mainframe availability status

plain text - not great for mobile

no links

gopher

1991 - web before the web, mainly used by universities

still plain text

we now have links

other types of resources can now be served

gemini

2019 - the hero of our story

gemtext - subset of Markdown, easier than html to understand and make accessible content

resposnive clients

links

more modern types of resources can be serverd compared to gopher

user identities

How do I use these protocols

Much like you would use Chrome or Firefox to access the web you are used to, the best way to access the above protocols using a specialised browser for them.

Lagrange is my recommended choice, allowing you to access all three protocols I've discussed and over 50 times smalller than chrome.

Comparisons

weather:

=>https://openweathermap.org open weather map (HTTP 1MB)

=>gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/chilly.cgi/ chilly (gemini 1.2KB)

BBC News:

=>https://bbc.co.uk/news BBC News homepage (HTTP 2MB)

=>gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/ Newswaffle BBC (gemini 16KB)

Whats out there?

Games:

Word games

Text based versions of games like minesweeper

One user currently working on a tamagotchi game

Socials:

BBSs

Station

Content Discovery:

Agregators

Search engines

Zines

Most of the content is in self hosted servers/capsules waiting for you to stumble upon it.

Go Discover!

Afterword

Well short and sweet I guess. It did seem like it was well recieved with a number of questions from the audience. Follow-up questions mainly on the technical specification of Gemini and sustainabily browsing both the HTTP web and Gemini.

Part of me would have liked to do a longer talk to dive deeper into the specification or talk about other protocols but at the time I was just glad to sit back down and listen to someone else speak.

If you are thinking about spreading the smol word by doing a simillar talk, go for it! For most of your audience it will be their first introduction to these spaces, so keep things as simple as possible.