[nmglug] the slow web - Gemini, Gopher & the tildeverse

[art at pin2.io]

I think I’d briefly mentioned the revival of the proto-web standard Gopher and its younger sibling Gemini in an email earlier. I got playing around with Gemini and thought I’d share my experience in advance of this week’s meeting.

For folks that haven’t heard of Gopher, it’s a text-based predecessor (and briefly) competitor to the WWW. It lost out when folks saw WWW which was almost Hypercard over the internet and didn’t charge licensing fees as was the case for Gopher.

Gemini is a re-imagined Gopher from some alternate cyberpunk universe with a cleaner document format and which runs over TLS. Project names borrow from the early days of the space race. It’s totally impractical, as it could have been implemented much easier with a subset of HTML or even as an alternate text/gmni MIME type on top of HTTPS. I still love it as it tickles my nostalgia centers for the earlier days of the internet. I’ll admit to having rose-colored glasses here. The modern internet is a place where you can get actual work done, but I sure miss the old times of weird personal interest pages and discussion forums. Gemini really brings me back to those days, especially since people don’t seem to quite know what to do with it yet.

If you want to give it a shot, amphora and bombadillo are nice clients and there are a number of servers out there (jet force, molly brown, twins and agate are the most mature, with agate appearing to be the easiest to set up). Ironically it’s a little tricky to set up a server on account of TLS. I’ve settled for shared hosting in the meantime on flounder.online and you can find me at hektor.flounder.online

There are some other hosting alternatives on the tildeverse, notably tilde.team and the Gemini-only tilde.pink
For those unfamiliar with the tildeverse, it’s a stupidly simple concept that has gained surprising traction: set up a VPS running Linux, give people accounts and let them create webpages in old-timey 90s html style, like my long-gone www2.colorado.edu/~barnesak website.

Cheers,
-Art


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