Gemini Vocabulary

One thing that gets a bit difficult to adjust to is the new vocabulary you'll be having to learn when browsing Geminispace. Here's a little glossary of sorts and a guide for anyone else who's new here (with comparisons to World Wide Web terminology).

A new internet communication protocol / a new way to transmit and format data in a website-like format. It aims to keep things simple and document/text-based and protect users' privacy rights. It's a middle ground to other net protocols like Gopher and HTTP.

The special document format used to parse and render pages in Geminispace. Pretty much every page you come across on Gemini will be written in gemtext. Its filename extension is .gmi. Compare to HTML.

The entirety of everything published using the Gemini protocol. You can kinda compare it to the World Wide Web, but on Gemini as opposed to HTTP.

Basically the Gemini equivalent of a website.

A directory of sites that are usually linked together based on a theme or just for community purposes. Compare to webrings.

The Gemini equivalent of a blog. If you're feeling spicy, you can call it a glog instead.

A digital certificate used to authenticate a user's identity. Most of the time you won't be required to use one of these during regular browsing of Geminispace. You create and apply these manually so it's nice for privacy reasons. Think of it kind of like a login.