An unofficial icon for gwit: 🪩 the Mirror Ball!

A funny little emoji icon popped up in this site's index page and in some recent post. In the beginning I was only looking for a way to visually distinguish the links in the index, but I must admit that the icon that I chose for the gwit link did grow on me…

Here some reasons why the mirror ball 🪩 (Unicode code point U+1FAA9) may be a good icon for gwit:

It looks a bit like the “globe with meridians” icon 🌐 frequently associated with the World Wide Web. Indeed, gwit sites form a similar Web consisting of Git repositories.

The ball is made of small mirrors. In gwit, any site that someone visited using a proper client would end up being fully cloned on their device (and they may republish it later).

A ball is way smaller than the Earth represented by the globe icon, it fits in your hands and may hang from your room's ceiling. The gwit network will likely be tiny in comparison with the WWW, and its sites way lighter.

The mirror ball is also known as a “disco ball”. gwit does define a low-tech distributed way of “disco-vering” other sites by conveying their ID/keys and Git remotes. I agree that this may be a little far-fetched…

Following the spaceflight topic popular among Gemini fans, the mirror ball does look a lot like the Telstar 1 & 2 satellites from Project Gemini times. Ok, this is definitely too far-fetched. 😅

The Telstar communication satellites

So, there goes my proposal for a gwit icon!

🍃

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