Checking back in on Gemini

So I haven't really taken a look at Gemini in around a year now. I got kind of tired of every other page on Gemini being about how great Gemini is. (ironic considering what the rest of this document is about). In the meantime I have been dabbling in other technologies a lot.

A lot of it web related, for one, my HTTP site is now generated using Hugo instead of completely hacked out by hand.

Another thing I have been working on is a bunch of LaTeX projects with the goal of creating a custom document class faintly based on a D&D book template I found on GitHub¹. My DM has the dream of turning our 4-year-long homebrew campaign into a book. Since he's rather dyslexic, I offered to edit his texts and where needed, convert them to machine parsable documents (mainly markdown to start with).

Aside from that, I have _also_ been dabbling with NixOS, going as far as having plans to move my home server from Debian Bullseye to NixOS once Bookworm becomes a stable release.

But then what got me to check out Gemini again you may ask.

Dabbling around in mobile phone operating systems of all things. There's something about the idea of having a minimalist interface to the internet on a phone that speaks to me. Ever since having had at least one Gemini pod (what do we call these sites anyway?), I've had at least one Gemini browser on whatever phone I've been using at the time. As a result, when installing a new OS on my phone, it was only natural to be reminded of the fact that I had a Gemini client on the old installation. So I decided to open Neo-Store² and see what clients I could find by chucking it in the interface as a search querry. The first one that popped up was Buran.

Buran

Crucially to me being here again, Buran uses the TLGS search engine by default. I decided to toss a random query into the search bar and it returned a _lot_ of results. Significantly more than I expected. So I opened up the stats page and saw the following.

I was utterly astounded by the amount of pages and domains indexed. Seeing how big it has gotten during the year where I hadn't paid much attention to it. Then I remembered that there still is an official Gemini page from where the whole project originates.

Three years of Gemini! on circumlunar.space

This, combined with talking to a colleague about it, kind of put into perspective how health the Gemini protocol is. Compared to the old internet, it really has a similar drive to it. Sure, it will never be as big as what the web became and that's by design. But seeing that amount of pages puts into perspective how many people care about it.

It manages to break down some of the cynicism I have towards the internet, modern technology and the world in general. There are still people out there who write for the sake of writing on a small platform exclusively with other people who write things for the sake of writing them. No ulterior motives. The vast majority of the people here being opposed to the cooperate web inherently.

¹LaTeX D&D book

²Neo-Store

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