blog.8-p.info

I recently know Gemini and a renaissance of Gopher.

Gemini is a new, collaboratively designed internet protocol, which explores the space inbetween gopher and the web, striving to address (perceived) limitations of one while avoiding the (undeniable) pitfalls of the other.

Gemini is a pretty simple network protocol and a hypertext format (text/gemini). Unlike IPFS, Gemini is not for building a decentralized web.

I do like the simplicity. HTTP and HTML are getting pretty complicated. HTTP/3 is probably a big engineering win that allows us to send more bytes efficiently, but the overall complexity makes me down. Along with the complexity of HTML + CSS + JavaScript, as Drew DeVault wrote, it is impossible to build a new web browser.

Gemini is first proposed in solderpunk’s phlog. This link may not work for you since it is in gopher://. Yes, that Gopher protocol. There is a huge Gopher community out there in 2020. Vice’s Motherboard was covering the scene in 2017.

Gopher and pubnix (public unix) servers and the whole phlogsphere remind me the early blogosphere. Phlogs often have links to other phlogs. It still has “everyone knows each other” feeling.