-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to geminiprotocol.net:1965...
-- Connected
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-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini
This document outlines the history of Project Gemini from its beginnings in 2019 to the present day.
Project Gemini was born and nurtured in Gopherspace, specifically in the "phlogosphere", that part of Gopherspace where people do what's called "blogging" on the web ("web log" → "blog", "gopher log" → "phlog"). A small but growing community of people were embracing the nearly 30 year old Gopher protocol as a kind of respite from what they perceived as an increasingly commercialised, centralised, resource-hungry, privacy-invading and user-hostile web. Some of them phlogged from time to time about the various ways in which Gopher might, in some people's eyes, be improved with small changes. Gemini's founder Solderpunk was one of these phloggers, and in the first half of 2019 he wrote a series of posts pondering the idea of a new protocol "in between Gopher and the web".
Some folks in the phlogosphere were interested in thinking about and experimenting with such a protocol and many others weren't. Solderpunk wanted to pursue the idea, at least for a while, maybe entirely hypothetically, but didn't want frequent and lengthy posts about a protocol design to take over his already long-running phlog. Thus, he created a second, parallel phlog dedicated specifically to the subject, so that people who were interested could follow along and those who weren't could ignore it and continue to read everything else. That side-phlog was announced on June 20th, 2019, and the announcement was the first time that the name "Gemini" was attached to the project. This is the reason that June 20th is used as the project's official "birthday", even though the general idea was in the air a little earlier.
The content from that side-phlog, which was maintained up until very slightly after the creation of the mailing list (see below) can now be read via Gemini at the link below.
Just two days after the creation of the side-phlog, Solderpunk was very surprised (though happily so!) on the morning of June 22nd, 2019, to find an email from fellow phlogger Sean Conner announcing that he had actually implemented Gemini as it was then specified. Sean had written a server in Lua, named GLV-1.12556 (after NASA's designation for the Titan rocket, or Gemini Launch Vehicle (GLV) which launched Gemini 1), which powered the server.
In order to actually access the new server, Solderpunk hastily converted his VF-1 Gopher client (named after the VF-1 Valkyrie from the Macross anime, in recognition of the role that the public access unix system SDF, which also takes its namesake from Macross, had played in keeping Gopherspace alive into the 21st century) into a Gemini client, named AV-98 (named after the AV-98 Ingram from the Patlabor anime). It didn't take long and on the same day the first successful Gemini protocol requests and responses between two separate parties took place.
Activity and interest in Gemini continued to grow slowly but steadily during the summer of 2019. The ad hoc system of propagating ideas and opinions through the early community via one-on-one private emails with occasional public phlog posts summarising rough consensus clearly wasn't going to cut it for much longer. The Gemini mailing list was started on August 14, 2019, thanks to the initiative of Jason McBrayer. It was hosted at the orbitalfox.eu domain, administered by a friend of Jason's, who generously provided hosting free of charge to support the project. Solderpunk announced the mailing list in his Gemini side-phlog on August 16, and the final post to that side-phlog was made the next day. From that point onward the mailing list was where basically everything happened.
Surprisingly, it wasn't until a little later that Project Gemini had a genuine "home of its own" in Geminispace. In response to the surprise appearance of Sean's server back in June, Solderpunk hurriedly setup a Gemini server at the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu, a free Gopher hosting provider and public access unix server he had run some for some years previously, and the Gemini specification, FAQ and other official documentation lived here, but this was only a stopgap measure. The gemini.circumlunar.space server was announced to the mailing on October 26th, 2019. All official content was migrated there from the Zaibatsu, and for the first time this content was also mirrored into the web.
To the surprise of everybody, a search engine for Geminispace appeared relatively quickly, in the form of Gemini Universal Search, affectionately known as "GUS" (a reference to astronaut Gus Grissom, command pilot of Gemini 3). GUS was created and operated by Natalie Pendragon, and first announced on the mailing list on February 25th, 2020. At the time, there were only 26 domains serving Gemini content! GUS went offline in early 2021, but the same codebase was adopted by the geminispace.info search engine which remains online today.
A pivotal moment in Gemini's history came on May 1st, 2020, when a link to the project's website was posted to the popular Hacker News link-sharing site. This lead to a very rapid increase in awareness of and interest in Gemini in a relatively short period of time, to put it mildly. In the three months before this happened, the mailing list received 108 messages posts from 17 distinct addresses. In the three months after, there were 1,839 unique messages from 158 distinct addresses!
The Hacker News feature didn't just drive up posting to the mailing list. A lot of the newly arriving Geminauts set up servers, too. Prior to this point, Solderpunk had maintained an artisanal hand-crafted list of links to every known Gemini server, hosted at the official project capsule. In those days you really could just explore the entire space in this way in a reasonably short period of time. As more and more servers came online, it became clear that this approach was not going to remain practical or useful for much longer. Furthermore, the then-new GUS search engine had begun providing an automatically generated list of all servers discovered via its crawling, which offered an obvious alternative. On June 14th, 2020, just shy of one year after Project Gemini started, the 50th Gemini server was added to the hand-curated list of servers and maintenance of the list was discontinued. The list is still online for historical interest. Many but not all of those early servers are still online!
While the surge of interest in Gemini that followed the Hacker News feature brought a lot of people, ideas, software, servers and content to the project in a very short period of time, it was also something of a double-edged sword. The cultural background and mindset of the early adopter community, rooted in Gopherspace, public access unix servers and embracing careful, deliberate limitations, transitioned very suddenly from being an unquestioned and implicit background assumption of the majority of the community to being a strange, minority view which had to be constantly defended. A lot of people were very enthusiastic and energetic about making Gemini as appealing and accessible to as wide an audience as possible, and seemed happy to sacrifice at least some of the project's original "spirit" in the pursuit of becoming a big deal. A sense of urgency and major importance permeated a lot of discussion. It was perhaps underappreciated at the time, but the wider context of the COVID-19 panic probably paid a role in some of this; a lot of people were stuck at home, out of work, had a lot of time on their hands and wanted something positive and hopeful they could be a part of.
It's definitely possible to overstate how bad things got. A lot of good ideas were shared on the mailing list and a lot of legitimate shortcomings of the Gemini specification were identified, and productive discussions were had. The rapid growth of Geminispace and its community was facilitated well by a single point of communication. But it can't be denied that the explosion of mailing list activity, the arrival of new and conflicting points of view, and the associated occasional heated tones also induced a kind of "soft fork" of the Gemini community. Many people who had previously been active contributors to the list stopped posting or even unsubscribed (some sought refuge in the tilde.chat #gemini IRC channel) and focused instead on writing software for Gemini as it was currently specced, setting up servers, launching capsules and writing content (meanwhile, some of the most frequent and vocal contributors to the mailing list never actually had any presence in Geminispace at all).
Solderpunk endeavoured to continuously engage with the mailing list in good faith and with an open mind, but frankly didn't handle it too well and eventually became kind of overwhelmed and burned out and started to withdraw from Gemini. On February 28th, 2021, he delegated authority to Sean Conner to finalise the Gemini specification. Two new specification documents, one for the network protocol and one for the document syntax, were written by Sean with input from the community. Later, in April of 2021, Sean also stepped away from his leadership role. Uncertainty and surprisingly even silence reigned for a long time, but eventually panic about the future of the project started to rise.
On October 25th, 2021, Solderpunk returned to the mailing list promising a swift, single-handed finalisation of all outstanding decisions regarding the protocol as soon as possible. Some work toward this did in fact happen, but it wasn't long until...
In the final days of December 2021, the entire orbitalfox.eu domain, including the Gemini mailing list, went offline due to a hardware failure. Initially it was unclear whether or not the mailing list would be resurrected or how long that might take. On January 16, 2022, Solderpunk created the Project Gemini news feed to maintain some ability for official communication with the community in the absence of the mailing list.
orbitalfox.eu never came back online. Thankfully, many people in the Gemini community had extensive archives of the mailing list covering its entire history, and nothing has been lost to posterity.
The prospect of having to replace the defunct mailing list so shortly after returning to the project overwhelmed Solderpunk again and he more or less disappeared for the entirety of 2022.
It's important to note that this lack of leadership did not appear to have any serious impact on the development of Geminispace itself, which continued to grow at about the same pace it had prior to disappearance of the mailing list.
The community stayed active, too. On July 25th, 2022, James Tomasino gave a talk at the Chaos Computer Club's "May Contain Hackers" camp in Zeewolde, the Netherlands, introducing Gemini (and Gopher) to a wider audience. This is believed to be the first public in-person presentation of Project Gemini.
After a year long period of no official activity on Project Gemini, Solderpunk returned to active leadership in the beginning of 2023 and has thus far maintained a modest but steady pace of "housekeeping" activity. The project FAQ was extensively overhauled, growing to more than three times its previous length, the project history document you are currently reading was written, and the project was finally given a domain of its own, with the official capsule relocated from gemini.circumlunar.space to projectgemini.net in early September.
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