-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to geminiprotocol.net:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini
The lowest commitment way to explore Geminispace is to use a web proxy or "portal", such as one of the following:
This will allow you to use a regular web browser, like Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, to explore Geminispace. This is very quick, very easy, and if you don't like what you see you can just close the tab and forget Gemini exists and that'll be that. If you *do* like what you see, you should consider installing a dedicated Gemini client, which will offer a better and more complete browsing experience. Read on to find out how to do that.
If you know what SSH is and how to use it, you can try out some terminal-based Gemini clients without installing them on your own machine first by running:
> ssh kiosk@gemini.circumlunar.space
No password is required, and once connected you'll be able to use an interactive menu to choose a client.
This Gemini kiosk was inspired by the Gopher kiosk at bitreich.org!
Thanks to its ease of implementation, there is a wide range of Gemini clients available for a wide range of clients. This client diversity is one of Gemini's strengths and we're proud of it, but it can be a little overwhelming if you are used to the monopoly situation that exists on the web. Below is a small list of some of the most widely used clients you might like to try as starting points:
A relatively complete list of all known Gemini clients can be found in the "Clients" section of the Gemini software list below, but beware that this list is not well curated. It contains very high quality, fully featured clients under active development and bare bones hobby projects that haven't been touched in years.
There's plenty of content in Geminispace, but finding it is not as instant or straightforward as some might hope or expect. Exploring Geminispace is not like exploring a new social media app or a multiuser website like Reddit, where everything exists in one place and you are immediately presented with big lists of people and topics. It's more like the entire web, where there are many websites spread out across many different servers, and some of them have lots of users who use the site to interact with one another, and some of them belong to one person alone. There is no single, central "front page" to the entire thing. You need to use a combination of search engines, subscribing to feeds, sharing links with friends and simple random exploration to find things, and you can use bookmarks to keep track of what you've found. It can feel slow and frustrating at first if you're used to being able to pull up an endless stream of fresh content whenever you feel like it, but the careful exploration and surprise discoveries are something a lot of people come to enjoy.
Geminispace is relatively new, and definitely still growing and changing. Capsules come and go over time, and tools for finding them come and go over time, too. This FAQ provides some links below to some popular and relatively well-established locations you can use as a starting point for your explorations of Geminispace, but it's inevitable that it won't always be totally up to date, so don't take anything below as the final word.
There are a number of public aggregators which attempt to make it easier to find recently-updated material in Geminispace. Because these pull in content from a wide range of different kinds of servers, they are one of the easiest ways to find long lists of recently posted content:
In earlier days, when Geminispace was smaller, simple lists of servers or categorised directories of capsules were a popular way to find content. As the space has grown, these have become more difficult to maintain, and some have disappeared or stopped being updated, but some are still online and maintained and can prove useful:
If you are looking for something in particular, Gemini has search engines you can try:
The geminispace.info search engine is powered by the same software behind the first ever Gemini search engine, the now sadly defunct GUS, which was launched surprisingly early in Gemini's life by Natalie Pendragon.
There are a number of multi-user Gemini servers with large userbases where you can find a lot of content in one place, and exploring these is a good way to find interesting content. Some of these services are listed in the answer to question 2.4 below.
There are a number of "zine" projects in Geminispace, which is well suited to the medium. At least one of them, smolZine (with, at time of writing, 39 issues published over more than two years), regularly links to "hidden (and not so hidden) gems" for its readers to check out:
Once you've found a capsule you enjoy via one of the above means, be sure to check whether the author has shared a list of links. Many Geminauts maintain a so-called "link garden" in their capsule, tending a collection of pointers to other capsules that they enjoy. These are a great way for related parts of Geminispace to stitch themselves together.
If you really want to find content that you can't easily stumble upon by any other means, it's also possible to explore Geminispace at random. A number of projects, like search engines, which "crawl" the entirety of Geminispace, also publish lists of every single server they have discovered. You can just click links on these lists at random and see where you end up!
This process has even been automated! DiscoGem is a capsule which publishes a new page every day which links to five capsules selected entirely at random from the list of capsules known to the Lupa research crawler. Spending just a few minutes checking in on DiscoGem every day can very rapidly expand your Geminispace horizons.
Of course, random exploration will still sometimes land you somewhere you've been before. To reduce the odds of this happening, you can limit your selections to relatively new servers. The geminispace.info search engine maintains, in addition to its list of all known hosts, a list of its fifty most recently discovered hosts:
Some Geminauts write tools to mirror content from the web into Geminispace. Sometimes that mirrored content is Creative Commons or otherwise permissively licensed, making this totally legitimate so it can be mentioned in an official FAQ! For example, among other mirrored resources, Geminauts are lucky to enjoy an excellent interface to Wikipedia.
If you like, you can run some helper programs on your local machine which respond to Gemini requests for URLs corresponding to other protocols, like Gopher or the web, by fetching that content and translating it, as best they can, from its original content in a Gemini-compatible form. Many Gemini clients support passing non-Gemini requests to such translating proxies. Gopher proxies work very well as Gemini and Gopher are both text-centric protocols with similar approaches to linking. Web proxies work well for some content but not well for others. It goes without saying that a Gemini client can never work as anything close to a general replacement for a web browser, but if there's a relatively small number of text-centric websites you like to frequent, using one of these proxies can make it a lot easier to make the switch from spending most of your online time in a web browser to most of your time in a Gemini client.
Gemini underwent an explosive surge of growth after being featured on the popular "Hacker News" website in 2020, at around the same time that the global Coronavirus pandemic meant that a lot of people were stuck at home, feeling disconnected and looking for something to do online that wasn't a Zoom meeting or doom-scrolling news websites. A lot of the capsules launched during this boom time are still online and active, but many of them were eventually abandoned and the domain registrations are starting to expire. A lot of people opened accounts at multi-user hosting providers and never did anything more than make a few "Hello, world!" or "Testing..." posts, but the provider as a whole is still going strong and staying online without clearing these capsules out. It's a little unfortunate, but it's also not at all surprising or problematic that not everybody who tries Gemini out decides to stick around for the long term. It's also not necessarily a healthy expectation that everything published on the internet stays up forever and ever by default, even after the responsible person has lost interest in or even forgotten about the content.
Of course, because Gemini pages are just individual, fully self-contained text files which by design cannot depend upon external resources to function, it's absolutely trivial to save a local copy of one if you are worried about it disappearing in the future. There's even a Gemini client which automatically maintains a persistent local cache of all pages you visit as you visit them! The main intent is to facilitate reading content while offline (to avoid distraction, or while travelling without connectivity, for example), but the mechanism also works just as well, at the level of an individual user, for protecting against link rot in those parts of Geminispace that you visit regularly:
As of late 2021, there's a Geminispace archiving service, known as Delorean, which is similar to the web's (in)famous Wayback Machine:
If you really want to track down some older missing content, there are some earlier archives you can try, but you'll need to download an file containing the entirety of Geminispace at the time and hunt locally:
It's difficult to know exactly. Counting unique hostnames of Gemini servers is likely to exaggerate the size of the space, since some multi-user sites give each user their own subdomain. On the other hand, counting unique IP addresses is likely to underestimate the size, as Gemini allows multiple different domains to be served from the same IP.
At any rate, as of mid 2023, there are about 425,000 known Gemini URLs, spread across about 2,500 capsules, about 1,700 domains, and about 1,200 IP addresses.
In early 2022 there were about 284,000 URLs across 1,900 capsules, 1,300 domains and 1,000 IP addresses, while in early 2021, there were about 200,000 URLs across 750, 500 domains and 600 IP addresses. So, no matter which way you care to measure it, Geminispace has been expanding steadily since day one.
You can find the latest statistics as the link below:
There are many options for getting content into Geminispace. The choices below are listed in approximately increasing order of required technical skill and expense.
There are a number of multi-user hosting services where all you need to open an account and start publishing content is either a standard web browser or a Gemini client which supports client certificates. You don't need to open a terminal or use the command line or mess about with file permissions or even know what any of these things are.
The very simplest way to start publishing in Gemini is to use a service which has a web-based front end. You don't even need a Gemini client installed to use one of these services! Although of course, you'll need one to actually view what you publish, and also to explore what's been published by your fellow users! Note that Gemlog Blue is the only one of these services where you content ends up published exclusively in Geminispace. The others make content available over Gemini and other protocols simultaneously, either the web or Gopher or both.
Services allowing to publish to Geminispace using a web browser:
There are also some purely Gemini-based multi-user services with easy interfaces. To use one of these, you'll need a Gemini client which supports something called "client certificates". All of the most popular GUI clients support this, so these services generally "just work". You only need a Gemini client to publish, and you can only access the content with a Gemini client. The whole experience of reading and writing within one of these services can happen from inside the same program, so the overall user experience is very familiar and not that different from using a web browser to access, say, Reddit or Twitter.
Technical limitations of Gemini protocol mean that platforms which work this way are largely limited to letting their users post relatively short, text-only content. The length restriction is not as severe as Twitter's 280 character limit so it's definitely not true that this paradigm cannot support large and active communities. But if you want to write long form content, more like what you would find on the web at Medium or Substack, or you want to be able to upload images or other non-text content to your capsule, then for now you will need to move further down the list of options in this section.
Services allowing to publish to Geminispace using a Gemini client with client certificate support:
A growing number of "pubnix" or "tilde" communities (multi-user unix systems where users interact with one another by SSHing in and using local email, chat and BBS applications) also offer Gemini hosting (typically alongside web and/or Gopher hosting). This is generally not quite as immediately easy and intuitive a way to setup a Gemini capsule as using one of the services listed in 2.3.1, but on the other hand most of these communities are actively interested in helping their users learn more about computing in a unix environment and will have chat rooms and/or bulletin boards in place where you can ask for help. If you are interested in publishing in Geminispace and you have been wanting to try to improve your general computing skills and know-how as well, joining a pubnix can be a great way to move toward both of these goals simultaneously!
You may be able to get an account at one of the communities in the (non-exhaustive!) list below. Please note that most of these communities are older than Gemini itself, and may be more focussed on other services, or may be specific to a particular theme or interest. Research your choices carefully and join somewhere you think you might fit in well overall, rather than just treating these amazing little worlds as free space to dump your stuff.
If you belong to a pubnix community which doesn't offer Gemini hosting, it can't hurt to ask the admin(s) if they are interested in adding this service!
If you already have a relatively high level of computer proficiency, and you are not interested in the community aspect or additional services of a pubnix/tilde server, but you also don't want the hassle or expensive of running your own server (see 2.5.4 below), then there are some providers who just offer Gemini hosting via either SFTP or Git repositories:
The option offering you the most independence, freedom and control over your Gemini presence is to set up your own Gemini server on a VPS or a computer in your home (small SBCs like the RaspberryPi are perfectly capable of acting as Gemini servers!). Even if you use a computer in your home, you will probably still need to buy a domain from a registrar at a yearly cost, so some financial commitment is required, but this can often be relatively low.
There is a wide range of server software available to choose from in the "Servers" section of the Gemini software list below:
It's true that you need a good level of technical knowledge to host your own Gemini capsule, and it's definitely not an option for everybody. At the same time, even if you've never done something like this before, you shouldn't think of it as an impossible hurdle and discount the possibility. Even old dogs can learn new tricks, and the desire to setup your own capsule can act as a motivator to learn new skills. In you succeed, the sense of achievement and feeling of self-empowerment will be a great reward, and even if you don't, chances are good that you will still come away from the experience having learned some things you didn't know previously. Ask the community questions about things you don't understand, and maybe write helpful guides for others about the thing things you do understand:
Gemini uses its own very lightweight markup language for pages, commonly referred to as "gemtext" and served with the unregistered MIME type text/gemini. Gemtext looks an awful lot like the popular Markdown language, but is in fact distinct and simpler (see 4.3.4 if you're wondering why we didn't just use Markdown). You can learn more about gemtext at the links below:
It's important to understand that most of the features provided by gemtext are not there to let you control the way your capsule looks when somebody visits it, at least not directly. Gemini differs radically from the web in that it puts complete control over what capsules look like not in the hands of the person publishing the capsule, but in the hands of the person viewing it. The same capsule might appear in ten distinct ways if ten different people look at it using ten different clients. We're completely okay with that! See question 4.3.3 if you're curious as to why.
For example, you can use lines beginning with # to place headers in gemtext documents, but don't think of this as "a way to make some text big and bold". It's supposed to be a semantic thing. Gemini clients and a lot of other Gemini tooling relies heavily on headers to do things like present user interface elements that assist with quick and easy navigation of long documents with complicated structure, or to figure out how to title links appearing a subscription tool. If you use headers stylistically instead of semantically, this might have unintended consequences.
Of course, most clients do also put headers in a larger font or whatever, but they are not at all required to.
Some people find it disconcerting to publish something and not receive any immediate feedback, in the form of "likes" or comments or upvotes or boosts or follows to let them know what people thought of it, or even whether anybody saw it all! Posting to Geminispace can feel like shouting into the void, or throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean, especially when it's your first time. People have a wide range of feelings and reactions to this, all of them valid.
Some Geminauts (especially those of the "small internet" persuasion, see 6.3) actually consider the "bottle in the ocean" nature of a Gemini page a benefit. When you receive immediate feedback in the form of "likes" or similar, you inevitably, even if only a little, even if you are actively trying not to, allow your future postings to be influenced by it. You start skewing your writing in the direction of what you think your readers want to read, even though your mental model of your readers is constructed on the basis of very flimsy feedback, that people leave quickly, easily, often anonymously, often with no real consequence for them, often after their own response has been inevitably influenced by what they have seen of everybody else's response. When you're tossing bottles into the electronic sea, you're much more likely to actually be your authentic self and write what you actually think about what you actually want to write about. It can be therapeutic for the author at the very least, or help them straighten out and give concrete form to some ideas that have been floating around in their head. But even as a reader, stumbling upon something which really resonates with you that you found in a random old bottle floating in an obscure corner of the internet, maybe many years after it was written, with no prospect of any further contact with the author, can be an surprisingly emotional experience. There's a kind of raw human intimacy involved that, despite being shared over great distance and great time, feels more profound than anything achieved with quicker, seemingly more "connected" forms of online contact. Pubnix/tilde communities are a great place to hunt for ancient bottles, as they tend to stay online for years, even decades.
Many Geminauts choose to leave an email address or a Fediverse or XMPP username (maybe one created just for the purpose) on their capsule, so that readers who want to let them know that they liked their post or that they disagree with an idea can reach out to them. This can be a bit scary, but it often works out very well. It's a higher barrier to feedback than a drive-by upvote or downvote, meaning you get them a lot less often, but when you do get them to tend to be of much higher quality. Because it's less convenient, they only come from people who really genuinely care about what you wrote. They didn't necessarily agree with everything you said, but even criticism tends to be "better" in this system; when people aren't leaving their feedback in a public forum where the feedback can itself get feedback, they feel less need to ham it up and make cruel jokes to score points with an audience. And when the feedback is positive, it can grow into a long term correspondence relationship because you're communicating from the get go over a general purpose medium that isn't linked to Gemini at all. If you're hosting your content somewhere like a pubnix server (see 2.5.2), it's likely that most of this kind of contact will come from fellow users of the same system, since they will peruse the user listings more often than outsiders, which means you already have a least one thing in common with most of the people you hear from.
Many Geminauts "reply to" or "comment on" a post they find simply by writing a post of their own in their own capsule, linking back to the original post to provide context. This helps readers of the second author discover the content of the first author, which is a useful function of this approach. There's no guarantee that the first author is already aware of the second author and will see the reply (an email might help with this, if the second author really considers it important). However, many people find posts to reply to on some kind of aggregator service (see 2.2.1), and as a rule of thumb, people tend to keep an eye on aggregators which include their own content (though of course there are exceptions), and so it's not unusual at all for back-and-forth "conversations" between groups of people to organically spring up on large aggregators. In this way, some popular Geminispace aggregators actually function something like a slower-paced decentralised social network, without there actually being any kind explicitly social infrastructure in place. For many Geminauts, this is actually their main form of interaction in Geminispace and they don't feel a need for anything more. This approach won't necessarily scale well to large and diverse communities, but there's no obstacle to and nothing wrong with setting up more aggregators with specific focal topics and different community norms as the need arises.
Not all Geminauts have strong negative attitudes toward the idea of "social" feedback, although for now they are probably in the minority. There are certainly social options available for those who want them, though.
If you are self-hosting your Gemini content, you have the option to use CGI applications or some kind of framework to add likes, comments, "mentions" or other such functionality to your capsule. Some available resources for this are:
You can also make use of some of the more "social" style Gemini apps which have recently appeared (see 2.5.1), where likes and replies are available and function more or less just like on the web. You can either actually post most of your content in these spaces and participate in the surrounding social interactions, or you can just use these places as a venue to solicit feedback and engage with our readers.
The most important thing you can do to attract and maintain a readership in Geminispace is to write content that people actually want to read! Without that, nothing will really help.
If you've set up your own Gemini server to host your content, you should probably consider submitting your URL to at least one of the Gemini search engines (see 2.2.3) so that your capsule gets indexed in the future. If you are using somebody else's hosting, chances are good the search engines will pick your content up without you having to do anything yourself.
Submitting either your entire capsule or some individual posts to one of the large Geminispace aggregators (see 2.2.1) will help people to discover your work. Depending on the aggregator, doing this might require you to either generate an Atom feed for your capsule, or else format some parts of your capsule to facilitate subscription.
Making it easy for people to subscribe to your capsule increases the chances that somebody who enjoys something you've already written will read things you write in the future. It's worth doing even if you aren't interested in being featured on one of the large, popular aggregators. Plenty of Geminauts do not check those aggregators regularly, preferring instead to curate their own reading experience by subscribing directly to capsules they enjoy.
The quickest and easiest way to make your capsule subscribable is to follow the relevant Gemini companion specification, linked to below. In short, any page containing links whose link text begins with a date in the YYYY-MM-DD can be subscribed to, either via aggregating tools or directly within some Gemini clients. If you format your links this way, you should also give the page a header line, as most subscription software will use this as a "feed" title and/or to format links.
If you like the sound of Gemini in principle and you're tempted to set up a capsule but you're worried that it'll be a waste of time because you'll only have a tiny audience compared to publishing on the web, or you don't want to feel like you are excluding people who don't know about Gemini yet or don't want to use it, don't despair! You can bihost your content in Geminispace and the web simultaneously. Read more about this in question 2.11.2.
If you build your capsule as a capsule first and foremost and use a tool like Kineto to automatically mirror it to the web, it's kind of like building a website using a very opinionated CMS that stops you building anything other than a very simple, clean, functional website. You can use CSS to style the generated HTML for a little bit of visual identity if that is important to you (you'll only have a handful of tags to work with, so it'll be hard to create anything too excessive), and then anybody with a web browser will be able to see it, possibly without having even the slightest idea that it's a Gemini capsule behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Geminauts will also be able to see it natively without having the slightest idea that it's also on the web. Both "teams" can see your content the way they presumably like best, and you can feel good about doing your individual part to make the average website a tiny bit less awful than the status quo.
Later, if you decide you'd like to go "all in" on Gemini, you can just stop running the mirroring tool and replace the mirror with a single static page letting people know you've gone Gemini only. Or, if for some reason you decide you don't want your content to be in Geminispace anymore, you can reconfigure your Gemini server to listen to connections from localhost only, so that the mirroring tool is the only way to access it. That way you can take as long as you need to convert your content to some kind of web-only CMS.
What have you got to lose, other than the power to build noisy, cluttered, invasive websites?
In addition to submitting your URL to search engines (see 2.2.3), you may wish to consider creating a robots.txt file in an effort to control how automated Gemini clients access your server:
If you already have a presence in Gopherspace, then you can very quickly and easily transition to bihosting the same content in Gopherspace and Geminispace simultaneously using the GeGoBi (for "Gemini-Gopher Bihosting") tool. It takes care of translating Gopher menus into gemtext documents. You can continue to simply maintain your Gopherhole in whatever way you are used to, and the Gemini mirroring is entirely automated.
You can do this in one of two ways.
It's easiest if you begin by creating a Gemini capsule. Then you can quickly and easily bihost the same content on Gemini and the web simultaneously using the Kineto tool, which mirrors a single domain Gemini capsule into the web:
This is the way the geminiprotocol.net website works. Solderpunk only maintains the Gemini version, and Kineto takes care of the rest.
The other way is to start with a website. This way is trickier, because mapping from the web to Gemini is "lossy". But some people have managed to e.g. convince the Hugo static site generator to output both HTML and Gemtext versions of a site:
Blurring the distinction between these two approaches is a minimalistic web CMS called Lichen, which uses gemtext as its storage format (much like many other CMSes would use MarkDown). With a little configuration, you can take advantage of this design to serve the same content via Gemini and the web simultaneously:
It's no problem to point GeGoBi at a Gopherhole and then point Kineto at GeGoBi to "lift" content from Gopherspace into Geminispace and the web, establishing a quick and easy presence on all three protocols. Doing this, though, doesn't let you take advantage of some of the ways that Gemini has tried to improve on the usability of Gopher. You would have to write Gophermaps instead of gemtext, for example, and your text would be hard-wrapped at 70 or 80 columns in order to look good in Gopher clients, which means that Gemini clients can't wrap it to fit the small screens of mobile devices.
If you treat a Gemini capsule as the "starting point" rather than a Gopherhole, you can use Kineto to get your content on the web, but then you need a way to translate "down" to Gopher. There doesn't seem to be any existing tools for this yet. It's a subtler problem than it seems at first. It's easy to take a gemtext file, wrap the lines to a specified number of columns, leave the rest as it is and just serve it as an item type 0 text file over Gopher. This forces your Gopher audience to read raw gemtext, which is not exactly difficult or ugly, but feels a little disrespectful toward the space. On the other hand, it's easy to go a step further and automatically translate gemtext pages to Gopher menus, so that the links become selectors and can be followed without copying and pasting URLs, and it's not even immediately obvious that the content has originated from Geminispace. But then you've created one of those Gopherholes where absolutely everything is a menu, and as discussed in question 4.2.2 that's also not really in the spirit of Gopher (although plenty of people who are active only in Gopherspace do it anyway, so it can't really be considered the act of a "foreign barbarian"). Doing "Gemini-first tri-hosting" in a really respectful and thoughtful way toward Gopherspace requires a little bit of thought and may need some custom tooling for your presence.
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