Gemini is both a document markup format and an internet protocol for accessing and downloading documents and other files.
The official project website is gemini.circumlunar.space.
The Gemini format is a plain-text format. The formatting is line-based and the documents are encoded using UTF-8.
Since the document format is simple and lacks recursive features, it can be parsed with a basic state-machine parser.
The Gemini protocol is a simple network protocol that can be used to fetch files from servers. The protocol follows a request-response model, and handles one response per connection. This is similar to HTTP with the Connection: close header.
The protocol uses a TLS connection over TCP. Here’s how a simple exchange looks.
gemini://example.com/homepage.The project was well-received in Hacker circles; such as Hacker News, the Tildeverse and the Fediverse. A lot of people who are involved with the Gopher protocol have shown interest in the Gemini protocol as well.
The Gemini community, both users and developers, mostly communicate via their mailing list. The mailing list archives are also available on the internet.
On 2021-09-27; Jason Evans, a member of the Usenet Big-8 Management Board, asked the Gemini mailing list members to see if anyone would be interested in an official Gemini newsgroup.
On 2021-10-22, it was decided 1 that comp.infosystems.gemini would be created.
Aside from blogs and personal notes, the Gemini community provides a lot of services over the protocol. Some of those services include search engines, news aggregators, weather reports and discussion forums.
Similar to Gopher, Gemini also has multiple proxies that allow the content to be viewed from web browsers. Here are some example links.
Most aspects of the protocol and the document format are very simple and easy to implement. Despite this, the protocol specification mandates the use of TLS, making stand-alone implementations very difficult. If one is okay with using an external library or wrapper to implement TLS, the rest of the protocol should be quite simple.
As Gemini has been designed with implementation simplicity in mind, there is a large number of Client and Server implementations available.
gmni is a command-line utility to fetch documents over the Gemini protocol. It is developed by Drew DeVault. The source code can be found here.
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skuf22$8di$2@theuse.news.theuse.net on Fri, 22 Oct 2021 10:22:26 EDT. ↩