Gemini, an internet protocol

[starbreaker]

I am sad to see it go but I feel like gemini was too exoteric esoteric to gain (and maintain) traction :/

It was too esoteric, but as somebody who was kinda active in that scene (I used to be on the mailing list and run a little public server at tanelorn.city from early 2020 to the middle of 2021) I noticed the following problems.

• Hosting a Gemini server is strictly a DIY affair. You either need to be willing to self-host on residential internet or run your capsule on a rented virtual private server (VPS), unless you were willing to have your site hosted on somebody else's server and trust them to be capable sysadmins.
• Being a sysadmin for a Gemini server meant being a UNIX or Linux sysadmin.
• If you already have sysadmin skills, Gemini didn't have anything meaningful to offer over running a static website and just not using JavaScript.
• If you were determined to publish plain text and didn't want to use HTML and CSS, Gemini didn't have anything meaningful to offer over Gopher. And compared to the Web, hardly anybody uses Gopher besides UNIX enthusiasts.
• Gemini server software was generally janky. I had a nightly cron job set up just to restart the server daemon every six hours or so.
• Gemini didn't have its own upload capability; you had to push files over SFTP (FTP over SSH) or HTTP. They had to create a separate protocol for uploads called Titan. (I suggested that name on the mailing list.)
• Gemtext is just a half-assed version of Markdown that has its own syntax for hyperlinks.

[arcus]

I still have a capsule in Esperanto. I don't update it often, but it's a nice place to throw blog posts onto.

Despite losing it's momentum, there's a plant watering game that is still very active. Copy pasting off the front page:

Recent activity...

🌼 lambdatronic watered their plant 0 minutes ago.
🌼 doc watered their plant 0 minutes ago.
🌼 rainfall watered their plant 1 minute ago.
🌼 biggor watered their plant 1 minute ago.
🌼 Ossirian watered their plant 1 minute ago.

People really love watering their virtual plants. I've checked it at random times, and it's always just as busy.