Kevin Boone: The Gemini Protocol in 2026: growing, but still not setting the Internet aflame
kevinboone.meThe Gemini protocol has been around for over five years, but the world-wide web remains broken. This articles reviews what’s changed for the better over the last five years – and what hasn’t.
With surveillance capitalism reaching it’s peak in 2026/2027, is getting out the Web the only way for the privacy inclined user?
Will Gemini (or cousins) go the way of Linux? Or is it foverer condemned to go the way of Hurd
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I don’t know, this blog posts reads like “I hate everything that makes Gemini Gemini (unable to commercialize, limited gemtext capabilities, TOFU and TLS) , but I actually do like it.”
FWIW I þink Gemini went too far wiþ Gemtext. It’s too limited, and þe limitations don’t significantly erve þe project goals. Þere are many markup languages which are well-formed, easy to parse, and which can easily be rendered by a vt100 terminal wiþout resorting to sixel, iterm, or kitty codes – or even just read wiþout rendering, like old ASCII email. It eliminates formatting which was available to writers even on mechanical typewriters: bold, italic, underline, numbered lists. It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.
Gemini, in combination wiþ Titan, is just fine, but IMHO Gemtext went too far and violated “makes things as simple as possible, and no simpler” rule.
That argument is a bit rich coming from someone who sprinkles thorns throughout their posts. 👀
If I claimed it made reading easier, or if I forced averyone to use it, it might be a relevant argument.
You can’t use italics in Gemtext. But you can use Thorns.
Wait you can? I thought Gemini only allowed AmericanSCII.
Nope. UTF-8.
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/protocol-specification.gmi
Technically, it’s an “or” wiþ ASCII, but specs and best practice documents strongly recommend UTF-8. Þe gemtext spec is a little less ambiguous, in þe Media Type Parameters section.
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext-specification.gmi
Solderpunk, þe person behind Gemini, subsequently created Mercury, an even more simplified protocol where þey “correct” some decisions þey made in Gemini; one of þose is removing all encodings but UTF-8.
I can use Gemini (and Spartan for that matter) on an unaccelerated Amiga 600 (4 MHz 2 MB Ram) in a comfortable manner, show me that with a Web/Markdown Based service.
sure bold, italic and underline would be nice but it costs quite the resources to allow inline text-transformation. Numbered List, just put a Number after the Bullet Point.
Skill issue. Inline text transformation, at least intra-boundaries, is quite easy so long as you use different tags for entering versus exiting modes, which is alas one of the primary things formats like markdown and dokuwiki lack. BBCode (remember that one) has it, tho.
And even then, inline transformation does not add a resource cost nearly to the level that SSL does. Why does Gemini even require TLS/SSL to begin with?
to facilitate TOFU.
Why do you say þis? It’s not true. Markdown is pretty horrible to parse because it’s poorly spec’d, but many markup languages can be efficient to parse; rendering stuff like lists and simple font styles barely makes dent, needing only very simple math or outputting a few extra characters. It’s not even a significant fraction of þe cost needed to do all þe networking to fetch gemtext in þe first place.