I’ve been interested in gemini for quite a while now. It’s a protocol that serves up plain text with hyperlinks, and that’s about it. It’s pretty much the most minimal experience of the internet that you can imagine.

I think people like gemini for (1) its obscurity. From what I can tell, your odds of accidentally saying something that goes viral on gemini are virtually nil. Also for (2) its privacy. There’s no tracking of anything. That’s just not built into the protocol. And (3) for its smolness. Gemini is the web at a much more human scale. The Wikipedia page on the gemini protocol estimates that there are a total of about 2300 capsules (sites). That’s tiny. Sometimes tiny is what you want.

I’d start my own capsule if I had more bandwidth for writing right now. But I have way more writing to do than I can possibly keep up with at the moment, so starting a capsule sounds a bit irresponsible. Nonetheless, I happily run the AV-98 client, and I pretty reliably keep up with a number of capsules. Gemini is something I definitely want to pursue further.

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