Happy birthday, Gemini!

Last summer I had been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing in my phlog on the subject of improvements which could be made to gopher, as part of a wider conversation which was going on in the phlogosphere at the time. I wanted to keep following that train of thought, but I knew that not everybody in the Gopher community was interested, and I also didn't want the subject to steal too much focus away from the other things I had been happily phlogging about for years. So I decided to start an entirely new section of my gopherhole, and announced in my phlog that I would be sticking all future posts on the matter of new protocol design there, in a separate space for those who wanted to follow it. In the same announcement, I gave the thing a name for the first time: Project Gemini! I made that announcement on June 20th, 2019.

Project Gemini announcement

At the time, I honestly didn't consider the project anything more than a thought experiment. I was genuinely shocked when I heard just two days later on June 22nd that Sean Conner had gone and actually *implemented* the damn thing and setup a publically accessible Gemini server at gemini.conman.org. I'm no less surprised to be writing this message one year later in the knowledge that Geminispace is just shy of *one hundred* public servers! The enthusiasm that Gemini has attracted and the growth that the community and the space have undergone in the past year has exceeded my every expectation.

I would like to say "thank you" to everybody who has contributed to Gemini in a small way or a big way in this time. Thanks to everybody who has helped shape the protocol through discussion on the mailing list (and thanks to the generous host of this mailing list!); to everybody who has written a server, or a client, or any other software; to everybody who is running a Gemini server; to everybody who is producing content for Geminispace; and to everybody who is helping to spread awareness of the project.

We've come a long way in the past year, and I think we can rightly be very proud of what we've built. Now that the fundamentals of the protocol have solidified, I am very excited to see what we can achieve together as we start to shift focus toward building both static and dynamic content in our new space: the Gemini journey has only just begun.

Onward and upward!