Project Gemini

Read the 100 word intro and still don't know what this is. Left.

I really enjoyed messing around with Gemini a while ago! But after the "messing around" stage with the protocol itself, the restrictions inherent to gemtext sapped my excitement around it.

It's a mark up language squarely focused on those that write text, but arduous to use if you want to share things you've illustrated, which is most of what I share online that isn't tech related. There's of course the argument that inline images/a spec'd way to expose an image directory listing with thumbnails/etc would only serve to distract or exploit you... but that also ignores the fact that people make art for your eyeballs too. Text is certainly the first class citizen, where images/music/video are all tied for second class, accessible only by downloading them 1 by 1.

That does mean it's perfectly fit for purpose! I wouldn't say it's bad just because I don't get my specific needs met. Someone who's needs are met by Gemini will love it.

From what I remember about the name, it's derived from NASA space programs. Where Gopher is Mercury, Web is Apollo and Gemini is in between.

Gemini is a new internet protocol which:

- Is heavier than gopher

- Is lighter than the web

- Will not replace either

- Strives for maximum power to weight ratio

- Takes user privacy very seriously

I built and run a search engine and a "Wayback Machine" for Gemini:

gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev

There are ~4K hosts and ~1M documents/images/files which make for nice playground with experimenting with crawlers, indexers, and more. Its a nice hobby. Lots of primarily static sites, and CGI is used to add some interactivity:

gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/moon.py

Related:

Six Years of Gemini - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44578143 - July 2025 (166 comments)

(There are others but a little hard to sift apart from you-know-what)

Gemini was so much fun during lockdown - I loved the distraction of a new simple protocol, and the challenge of writing a gui client for it.

Can't say I'm surprised that it hasn't taken the world by storm, but it's still a cozy part of the Internet.

I created one of the first social networks for it. Still running: https://martinrue.com/station

My main blog is now an "anonymous" gemlog. I use the kineto http proxy to provide a website version as well. I wrote a little deploy script that scrapes my posts and creates an atom XML feed (static doc) that kineto serves for those few people who want to stay up-to-date.

Once a quarter, I batch up the recent posts and bcc a bunch of folks I like to keep in touch with. Some of them respond. This is what I do in place of social media now; outside of email, Discord and WhatsApp are all I use to keep in touch with folks.

I also like to poke around different gemlogs with Lagrange, which is a nice desktop-oriented Gemini client. It's good fun.

I've had a Gemini Capsule (what Gemini calls a 'website/blog' since about 2021. It gets very little traffic, but it's fun to have. Browsing the smallweb is nice in the evenings when I want a high signal-to-noise ratio of interesting content.

Honest question, how do you discover interesting content over this protocol?

Is there people building the equivalent to web directories and web rings? Or search engines? What are the cultural expectations on navigating other people's published resources?

If we maintain this trajectory Gemini is going to have as many dual meanings in the software world as Map.

> Project Gemini

I have a theory that the idea you'd call your project "Project X" comes from TV shows.

We work with project codenames and we don't call anything Project X. We just call it X. It feels like adding the word "Project" is something a screenwriter would do to make the dialogue clearer.

I have got only two annoyance on Gemini, lack of inline links and _font styling_, and they are by design (https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi#44-questions-about-t...)

It's fine for something like HN, but I heavily rely on named links and emphasis on all my blogs and is a dealbreaker.

Too many things are named Gemini

I looked at this a few years ago and it seemed to be a graveyard of toy implementations and personal blogs.

I'd love a minimal protocol like this that was also somehow scraping resistant.

Why is everything named Gemini these days?

Recently:

Six Years of Gemini

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44578143

If this is being developed, it should have a more modern description. Comparing it to Gopher is fine as a historical point, but comparing it to http/html is more useful today. I read the faq for geeks and didn't learn much:

> 1.1.1 The dense, jargony answer for geeks in a hurry

> Gemini is an application-level client-server internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between hosted files. Both the protocol and the format are deliberately limited in capabilities and scope, and the protocol is technically conservative, being built on mature, standardised, familiar, "off-the-shelf" technologies like URIs, MIME media types and TLS. Simplicity and finite scope are very intentional design decisions motivated by placing a high priority on user autonomy, user privacy, ease of implementation in diverse computing environments, and defensive non-extensibility. In short, it is something like a radically stripped down web stack. See section 4 of this FAQ document for questions relating to the design of Gemini.

Annoyed that for a system about plain text links, there's no link to "section 4".

The transport sounds like http without saying so. It doesn't go into why it doesn't use http. I'd probably be fine with HTTP and Markdown + image/video links. Maybe the Gemini document capabilities/scope is better but they're not described.

Edit: they are in "4.1.2"[0] Be warned, there's still a lot of beating-around-the-bush.

> 4.1.2 I'm familiar with HTTP and HTML. How is Gemini different?

[0] https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi#412-im-familiar-with...

Edit 2: Seems opinionated in many stupid-by-todays-needs ways. It feels like text-web made by some group of deniers.

So Gopher?

[flagged]

Not the Gemini I was hoping to see in the front page today :D