Friday August 20th 2021 by SocraticDev
How about reading the news on your terminal? And let it be a pleasant experience. The Gemini protocol offers an alternative to the http web protocol to serve semantically rich content according to client / server dynamics.
Most hackers find the web bloated. A regular website makes several calls to different servers to download the files necessary for its operation. In addition to the advertising that no one wants to see, the average site offers a lot of features that don't add value to the user. JavaScript frameworks are true cathedrals; pyramids of dependencies that no one wants to maintain. It is absolutely not the web that Sir Berners-Lee had dreamed of.
Is our daily experience with the web inevitable? Can we escape this circus and come back to a simple, uncluttered web that delivers exactly what the reader is looking for. A super light, fast web lean that meets the needs of the majority of users: to access information.
what is the Gemini protocol
Gemini is a new internet protocol that:
- Is heavier than
gopher - Is lighter than the
web - Will not replace the
webeither - Aim for a maximum weight / power ratio
- Takes user privacy very seriously
The protocol was established by hacker Solderpunk in June 2019. An open community has helped him.
"Gemini is designed as part of the Internet protocol suite. Like HTTP, Gemini functions as a request-response protocol in the client-server computer model. A Gemini browser (analogous to a web browser), for example , can be the client and an application running on a computer hosting a Gemini site can be the server. The client sends a Gemini request message to the server, and the server returns a response message. Gemini uses a separate connection to the same server for each resource request. "
-- Wikipedia, "Gemini(protocol)"
concretely
Instead of a web page, we talk about capsule gemini. These capsules are composed in a light formatting language called gemtext which looks a lot like markdown. The best practice is to compose the capsules from 'long lines' and not worry about the layout. The layout is entrusted to the client Gemini who optimizes the available space to promote the reading experience.
Personally, I have tried and adopted the amfora (Go) client which installs quickly through the Homebrew package manager:
brew install amfora
server side
On the server side, there are a multitude of gemini server implementations in most programming languages: python, c, Haskell, etc.
Personally, I adopted Bruno Bord's server https://github.com/brunobord/gemeaux. Why? It is written in python and does not require many dependencies. The readme.md is complete and I quickly managed to get it running on my personal server open on the Internet.
I then sketched out a small capsule for my online community. You just have to create a main file index.gmi and indicate to the server the directory from which to serve the files.
gemini://dailybuild.org
do I use Gemini every day?
I visit various current affairs capsules on a daily basis like npr, CNN and the Christian Science Monitor. The capsules load instantly, there are no ads, no videos, and the articles are laid out for efficient reading:
gemini://rawtext.club/~sloum/geminews/
