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’m pretty interested in Gemini but the learning curve to self-host is pretty steep. Not sure why someone can’t just create a docker image for those of us who believe in self-hosting but haven’t the skills (yet) to CLI .
Agate is a popular and actively maintained server that only serves static files, and it hosts images on ghcr.io. It’s a pretty short Dockerfile.
You can just scrap the protocol and serve plaintext, or with just basic html tags like bold , links etc if you want to, works with any navigator.
What is the benefit of using a special navigator?
I’m asking because I think the idea kind of neat, and I’m working on something similar.
Because it was designed on purpose to not even have the ability to be enshittified. No scripting engine, on purpose – no popup ads. No cookies, no tracking.
Things that were originally thought as good things to add to the browser in retrospect have been abused so much, it’s better to not have them available for mis-use.
The issue is the structures motivating companies to enshittify. Not the technology. Blame late stage capitalism not JavaScript.
I would consider renaming it so people don’t think it’s AI
What if that’s what the corpos want?
“Oh it’s the Tiniverse protocol now? Well check out Apple’s new Tiniverse microblogging product!”
