Hello, Gemini!

Gemini. An odd name for an interesting new concept based on something stuck in the 90s.

I have increasingly been seeing discussions of this new internet protocol on Mastodon. What is this mystery that has several people so mesmerized? It turns out that it is no mystery, unlike other new technologies. In fact, it is quite boring.

I'm serious. The specification of a certain other internet protocol (I'm looking at you HTTP) consists of at least dozens of pages of implementation details, while Gemini's specification is much shorter. There is much less to read, and consequently much less potential interest in it (of course, you'd first have to be the kind of person who finds interest in reading specifications for Internet protocols designed for transferring data from computer to computer).

To prove my point, compare the two specification documents:

HTTP/1.1 specification

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi

Gemini is boring. That is what makes it interesting. It simply serves data with no unnecessary features. It cannot do everything, and it is not meant to. That is the beauty of it.

We need more of this kind of simplicity in our technology. It promotes competing implementations and resists monopolization. The web is a mess right now because features are constantly added and only few browsers can compete.

Gemini is specifically designed to be simple and stay simple. It is explicitly designed to *not* be flexible. For example, it only allows one header (Content-Type).

> If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better.

- John Carmack

Gemini isn't for everything, and that's what makes it special.

I have set up my own gemlog and am now a new member of the brave new online world of Gemini. I can't wait to see what beauty the the community has crafted so far, and what awaits us in the years to come.

Look forward to more from me in the next few months. I'm not going away anytime soon. I'll be writing more on this gemlog and writing Gemini-related software.

Ĝis baldaŭ!