2023-08-14 - Changing domain names

I have registered the domain geminiprotocol.net. There is nothing there yet, but in the near future this will become the domain for the official Project Gemini capsule. Fear not, the familiar gemini.circumlunar.space hostname won't disappear. Instead, I plan to split the official capsule in two. The CAPCOM aggregator, the SFTP user capsules, and the SSH kiosk will all remain at their current gemini.circumlunar.space URLs. The official news feed, documentation like the FAQ, and the protocol specifications will move to the new geminiprotocol.net.

This is a big change! I will do all that I can to make it as smooth as possible. I'll put redirects in place to ensure that no links or bookmarks break, and my hope is that SFTP users will not even notice anything has changed aside from a very brief window of downtime. The change will probably happen in late August or very early September. I will make announcements here at every relevant stage to keep people abreast of the transition.

Why bother with all this hassle? From my point of view this change has several advantages. geminiprotocol.net is shorter and easier to remember than gemini.circumlunar.space (most people have never encountered the world "circumlunar" before!). Having the official capsule consist entirely of static content will make it much easier for people to mirror in its entirety, reducing the project's "bus factor". Having the SSH kiosk service on the same machine which hosts the official news feed, documentation and specifications increases the risk of that machine being compromised and those important resources being vandalised. Having CAPCOM and user capsules at the same domain name as the official resources increases the risk that unsavoury third-party content ends up appearing directly associated with the project, bringing it into disrepute. Separating out community-oriented stuff like CAPCOM and user hosting from the official documentation serves my long-term aspirations to make the official Project Gemini capsule about as interesting and relevant to the average Geminaut as the w3c.org website is to the average websurfer.

But just as important as all the above, perhaps even more important, is the simple fact that this just feels like the right thing for me to do, personally. I have never, ever felt good about using the circumlunar.space domain for the official home of Project Gemini. Circumlunar Space and Project Gemini are distinct projects of mine, with distinct (though overlapping) communities. I setup gemini.circumlunar.space at a time when Project Gemini was never expected to receive the attention it did, and I was reluctant to register a new domain for it. It was the quick and easy and cheap option, but it doesn't really gel with the established norms in the Circumlunar Space community about individual members setting up side projects on subdomains. Nobody has ever complained, but I don't feel good about it nevertheless. The planned split solves this problem in my head very nicely, and I'm also looking forward to taking advantage of gemini.circumlunar.space becoming my own personal Gemini "outpost", not an official part of Project Gemini, to spin-up various random experiments that catch my fancy.