Back on Gemini

Last week I sent a request to a public UNIX server and last night I was granted access. I’m still getting familiar with everything there, but I thought it was great that they had Gemini support right out of the box.

I discovered Gemini through James Tomasino, I came across his “What is the Tildeverse?” video on YouTube back in 2020 and during that time I was writing my capstone project for my philosophy degree. I was feeling what I can only describe as exhaustion from social media and the trends of the web, which prioritized advertising revenue over a good experience, leaving me with a desire for something different.

Over time, I became more familiar with Gopher and Gemini. Not from a technical perspective initially, but I was certainly taken by the feeling of innovation (and if I may, revolution) in ~solderpunk’s writings. I remember opening up my terminal and locking myself in my room until the early hours of the morning reading through phlogs, gemlogs, and learning as much as I could about this corner of the internet which shared my goals about what digitial interactions should be.

Technically, I was in way over my head. I started college as a computer science major, and by that point I had been programming for about five years. My domain had always been web development, and my experience with Linux and the command line was basic. I was more interested in the philosophy of computer science, I valued the internet as an instrument for communication and I cared deeply about its social aspect. Luckily for me, Gemini was in its beginning stages, and I was getting a first-hand look at its creation. I loved reading discussions on the mailing list about what features the protocol should include, I liked seeing new clients and servers being released in different programming languages. My first major software project came from this community when I created Athena, a Gemini client written in Ruby.

I took Gemini as an opportunity to dive deeply into the world of networking and give myself a chance to program while I changed my major to philosophy. I wasn’t saying goodbye to programming, but I needed to understand it from a different perspective. I was fortunate enough to study in a department where my professors came from the analytic tradition, meaning they were well-versed in philosophy of language, logic, theory of computation, and computer science was treated as a sister discipline to philosophy.

I started my Gemini journey by renting a VPS and purchasing a domain name. I installed a Gemini server called agate, and I followed some tutorials online to get that working. This protocol felt alive, there were so many people sharing their lives, writing tutorials, I loved it. I couldn’t wait to get out of class and read more. With my own Gemini capsule, I began writing too. My capsule was included in some aggregators, people began reading my gemlog and I had a nice correspondence going with a few people.

About a year after this, the activity level on Gemini began to diminish. Many of my bookmarks no longer worked. I would try to visit a capsule only to find it was no longer operational. I became busy with graduate school and I stopped using Gemini as well. My domain expired. I lost my VPS and my server stopped working too.

My interests have evolved in the time since, but I’m ready to give Gemini the love it so deserves. I’ve spent my time reading many blogs on the indieweb, but there’s something so charming about the simplicity of this protocol. In my own blogging endeavors, I find myself tweaking HTML and CSS documents, adding styles, changing fonts, updating themes, doing pretty much anything but write. With Gemini it was different. I understand that I don’t have control over my reader’s UI. There’s less pressure for me to focus on the styling and I can get right to the fun part, which is sharing my thoughts across the wire and reaching people who may be interested.

I’m not quite ready to set up my own capsule again on a VPS, but simply writing on a shared pubnix seems like a great way to get started :-)

I’ll say this though— navigating Gemini space feels claustrophobic right now. I don’t know how else to put it, but I think it’s more of an issue with how I’ve been accustomed to using the web (i.e., jumping from link to link) than something about the protocol itself. On Gemini, I have to read things slowly. On the web, I can skim stuff and if it doesn’t catch my attention I’m ready to bail. What a terrible habit.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back on Gemini.

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