The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it’s barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.
Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It’s self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.
Of course, you’ll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.
I’d love to see support for the protocol baked into the big browsers.
I really think we missed an opportunity to have an
app://protocol back in the ’00s instead of trying to kludge HTML into being software.Browsers could totally do multiple protocols. I think
ftp://andgopher://still works on most of them.Used to – I think both ftp:// and gopher:// have been removed by the big browsers (eg Chrome and Firefox).
Can’t have competing standards that might let us avoid ads now, can we?
B-but think of the golden parachute the Mozilla CEO can get!