gemini://mederle.de/b/01-intro.gmi

For a while now, I've been lamenting how the World-Wide Web devolved into a bloated commerce pit oligopoly. This space, I hope, will bring back some of the things I've been missing, and take out the incessant, permanent, never-ending noise of the attention economy — at least for me.

I'm a 1972 vintage, and my first contact with the internet happened at the somewhat, by today's standards, ripe age of 24. My daughter was born with all of it in place and in ubiquity. I am of an age where, for all my childhood, teen, and a part of my young adult years, the world was different. As different this pre-internet world, I imagine, for my daughter, as imagining a world without cars for childhood me.

I grew up the kid of a car family. We had a Citroën dealership with some Toyota, Datsun, Nissan on the side, and I've been interested in cars for as long as I can remember. I had a knack for quirky and vintage cars already as a kid. As a hobby, this was totally different from what it is like today. We went hunting for brochures at dealerships. When I had a special interest in some obscure car, more often than not sparked by some movie, research meant hunting for books or placing ads in car magazines asking for help. People would send carbon copies of book chapters or magazine pages by mail, and that was pretty much it, unless there was some club for this make or model that you could join.

In 1996, when I got my first internet connection through University, all this changed. Suddenly there was a host of information about everything, even a forgotten quirkfest automobile of the 1970s like, say, the AMC Pacer. There were mailing lists you could subscribe to and get in direct, almost instant contact with people who had the same weird interest as yourself. I had conversations with people from all over the world. Conversations!

How much fun this was, jumping from homepage to homepage, most of them lovingly handwritten in this HTML everyone was learning. Many of them hard to read because background pictures man! And virtually every website had a »Links« page with hand-picked, curated entries. From what I've read in this space so far, the sentiment of wanting this back is shared by many of us.

I read about this new protocol in a recent issue of German computer magazine c't. It's been a while since I've been this excited to learn about a new technology. It might have the potential to bring back a lot of what I've been missing. By hopefully making it virtually impossible to commercialize the users' data, and by keeping it so simple that new ideas can happen on top of that simplicity. Microsoft giving up on developing their own rendering engine for the WWW should worry everyone. It's gotten out of hand.

Unlike Gopher, Gemini might have a real chance to get adopted by a larger user group. Large enough to broaden the content and offer a niche for most. Not saying Gopher is dead, I would not know, I've never used it. I was active in Usenet for a number of years. I'm still mourning it even though it is not dead. The parts not used as binary dumps are dying a slow death, though. I've recently got an account again, and looking around in my old groups, it's still the same people as when I left 10 years ago. Like, there's 20 regulars in de.etc.fahrzeug.auto, and when one of them dies, there will be 19. I kind of hope someone will revive Usenet as well, it beats subscribing to dozens of web forums in many regards. With the current state of affairs, though, it's hopeless. Not dead, just irrelevant and not at all welcoming towards fresh blood.

I'm weird, I know. Even my partners say that. The only programming languages I truly enjoy are of the Lisp family. Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp. At work, I live in Emacs. It combines note taking, project management, document creation, Jira tracking, email, programming, all in one interface I can hack in every way I wish to. Case in point, the only other software that's currently open on my computer are a web browser and four more web browsers each wrapped in Electron. What do those do? They convey text and some pictures via internet protocols: Signal, Telegram, at work Teams. Ok, one is streaming music. Emacs as frontend could easily replace all of those.

I'm mentioning this because there seem to be a lot of like-minded weirdos in Gemini Space. There's a Gemini server written in Common Lisp, and it's serving this content here now. I'm a Computational Linguist. I like language, I like working with text. I think many Lispers do, or lotsa linguists like Lisp. In any case, this space is for us. Here's hoping Gemini browsers will enable rendering of org-mode files. I might have to take a look at Elpher, should be doable in a few lines of code, contained within parentheses.

My hope is that I'll learn new things from browsing Gemini Space. I haven't got the communications part down yet — something about backlinks?

Hi

Speaking of Cars

Gemini, Gopher, Usenet

Lisp

Me and You

Update