Last weekend I was building a mini RSS reader (you know how I do), and in the process I was going through some of the blog posts in my feed. One of them stood out:
This grabbed me particularly because I've been getting into cassette tapes as a hobby, both collecting and creating them. If you read the post you'll see that the tapes were originally released on something called Gemini. I didn't know much about it but I did know I wanted to download those tapes! After a bit of searching I found a Gemini client and was able to download the zip files which had everything I needed to make replicas of the original tapes.
The tapes are fantastic, but this whole event peaked my curiosity about Gemini. The more I learned, the more I liked. It's relatively new, only five or six years old, yet seems to have a small yet steady userbase. I found a better client to use in the terminal and I started exploring some more. Soon I found some gemlog (a micro blog on Gemini) aggregators which let me find some interesting capsules (a website on Gemini). I found one in particular that was really well done: loads of posts, cool links to other pages, and even a photo log! I had to navigate to each photo, press a key to open it, and then choose whether to download it or view it in my default app for viewing photos (Apple Preview in my case).
There was something magical about viewing bits and pieces of this person and their life through text on a screen and images that didn't load directly on the page. Who else knew this capsule existed? How many more people know Gemini exists? A small web floating on the internet with a vibrant set of people just wanting a peaceful existance. That is one of the primary reasons Gemini was created. The founders wanted a text based internet protocol that would let you link out to other pages, similar to HTML, but without CSS and JavaScript. The web had become too noisy and slowly invaded privacy down to the favicon. There were protocols like Gopher, but they had problems that went unsolved since is inception in the early 1990s. A new protocol was needed, and it became Gemini.
While I have become a new fan of Gemini, and will talk more about that soon, it's not the reason of this post. To be frank I don't think that Gemini is a replacement for the web or that it answers every single problem. I don't see myself ditching HTML altogether for something like Gemini. It's not Gemini itself the reason that I write this post, but rather the hope it brings. Gemini exists because a few people said enough is enough with the current state of the internet and did something about it. There were enough people who believed in the same idea and principles that now there is a decent community living on this network. People are sharing their lives, recipes, resources, you name it. It's not full of people who only talk about a niche topic or just talk about Gemini itself. They just use the protocol the way they envisioned the internet to be.
That, is what brings me hope. We don't have to take the abuse of our current internet sitting down. We don't need a VC funded company to build something that "saves us" by moving us to just another mental prison. We, the people, have the power to buid whatever we want. We can control our experience the internet, not the other way around. We can still connect with other people without social media, without noise, and to much surprise, we can do it without HTML.
I hope your main takeaway isn’t some kind of lecture on how you should use the internet and what it should look like. You can do whatever you want. However, if you’re like me, and you feel tired, worn out by the current state of the web, and you want to see a change: it’s already happening. That change starts with you, deciding to do something different, no matter what anyone else thinks.
I know this is a bit weird to make this post on HTML while boasting about another protocol, but I decided it was worth it to communicate the idea. If you're interested in Gemini and want to learn more or even get started, just follow these two steps:
- Install
amforawithbrew install amforaor one of the many other install methods - In the terminal run
amfora gem.stevedylan.dev/gemini-quickstart
I’ll see you in space 🫡
p.s. if you thought this post was about some coding CLI, sorry :)