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What-is-Gemini-anyway.md (7626B)


  1. ---
  2. title: What is this Gemini thing anyway, and why am I excited about it?
  3. date: 2020-11-01
  4. ---
  5. I've been writing about some specific topics in the realm of Gemini on my blog
  6. over the past two months or so, but I still haven't written a broader
  7. introduction to Gemini, what I'm doing with it, and why you should be excited
  8. about it, too. Let's do that today!
  9. [Gemini](https://gemini.circumlunar.space/) is a network protocol for exchanging
  10. hypertext documents — "hypertext" in the general sense of the word, not
  11. with respect to the hypertext markup language (HTML) that web browsers
  12. understand. It's a simple network protocol which allows clients to request
  13. hypertext documents (in its own document format, gemtext). It is, in some
  14. respects, an evolution of [Gopher][Gopher], but more modernized and streamlined.
  15. [Gopher]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
  16. Gemini is very simple. The protocol uses TLS to establish an encrypted
  17. connection (using self-signed certificates and
  18. <abbr title="trust on first use">TOFU</abbr> rather than certificate
  19. authorities), and performs a very simple exchange: the client sends the URL it
  20. wants to retrieve, terminated with CRLF. The server responds with an
  21. informative line, consisting of a numeric status code and some additional
  22. information (such as the document's mimetype), then writes the document and
  23. closes the connection. Authentication, if desired, is done with client
  24. certificates. User input, if desired, is done with a response code which conveys
  25. a prompt string and a request for user input, followed by a second request with
  26. the user's response filled into the URL's query string. And that's pretty much
  27. it!
  28. ```
  29. $ openssl s_client -quiet -crlf \
  30. -servername drewdevault.com \
  31. -connect drewdevault.com:1965 \
  32. | awk '{ print "response: " $0 }'
  33. gemini://drewdevault.com
  34. response: 20 text/gemini
  35. response: ```ASCII art of a rocket next to "Drew DeVault" in a stylized font
  36. response: /\
  37. response: || ________ ________ ____ ____ .__ __
  38. response: || \______ \_______ ______ _ __ \______ \ ___\ \ / /____ __ __| |_/ |_
  39. response: /||\ | | \_ __ \_/ __ \ \/ \/ / | | \_/ __ \ Y /\__ \ | | \ |\ __\
  40. response: /:||:\ | ` \ | \/\ ___/\ / | ` \ ___/\ / / __ \| | / |_| |
  41. response: |:||:| /_______ /__| \___ >\/\_/ /_______ /\___ >\___/ (____ /____/|____/__|
  42. response: |/||\| \/ \/ \/ \/ \/
  43. response: **
  44. response: **
  45. response: ```
  46. [...]
  47. ```
  48. So why am I excited about it?
  49. My disdain for web browsers is well documented[^1]. Web browsers are
  50. *extraordinarily* complex, and any attempt to build a new one would be a
  51. Sisyphean task. Successfully completing that implementation, if even possible,
  52. would necessarily produce a Lovecraftian mess: unmaintainable, full of security
  53. vulnerabilities, with gigabytes in RAM use and hours in compile times. And given
  54. that all of the contemporary web browsers that implement a sufficiently useful
  55. subset of web standards are ass and getting assier, what should we do?
  56. [^1]: [Exhibit A](https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop.html), [Exhibit B](https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html), [Exhibit C](https://cmpwn.com/@sir/104894723861368333)
  57. The problem is unsolvable. We cannot have the "web" without all of these
  58. problems. But what we can have is something different, like Gemini. Gemini does
  59. not solve all of the web's problems, but it addresses a subset of its use-cases
  60. better than the web does, and that excites me. I want to discard the parts of
  61. the web that Gemini does better, and explore other solutions for anything that's
  62. left of the web which is worth keeping (hint: much of it is not).
  63. There are some aspects of Gemini which I approve of immensely:
  64. - It's dead simple. A client or server implementation can be written from
  65. scratch by a single person in the space of an afternoon or two. A new web
  66. browser could take hundreds of engineers millions of hours to complete.
  67. - It's not extensible. Gemini is designed to be *difficult* to extend without
  68. breaking backwards compatibility, and almost all proposals for expansion on
  69. the mailing list are ultimately shot down. This is a good thing: extensibility
  70. is generally a bad idea. Extensions ultimately lead to more complexity and
  71. Gemini might suffer the same fate as the web if not for its disdain for
  72. extensions.
  73. - It's opinionated about document formatting. There are no inline links (every
  74. link goes on its own line), no formatting, and no inline images. Gemini
  75. strictly separates the responsibility of content and presentation. Providing
  76. the content is the exclusive role of the server, and providing the
  77. presentation is the exclusive role of the client. There are no stylesheets and
  78. authors have very little say in *how* their content is presented. It's still
  79. possible for authors to express themselves within these constraints &mdash;
  80. as with any other constraints &mdash; but it allows clients to be simpler and
  81. act more as *user* agents than *vendor* agents.
  82. Some people argue that what we should have is "the web, but less of it", i.e. a
  83. "sane" subset of web standards. I don't agree (for one, I don't think there *is*
  84. a "sane" subset of those standards), but I'll save that for another blog post.
  85. Gemini is a new medium, and it's different from the web. Anyone who checking it
  86. out should be prepared for that and open to working within its constraints.
  87. Limitations breed creativity!
  88. For my part, I have been working on a number of Gemini projects. For one, this
  89. blog is now available [on Gemini](gemini://drewdevault.com), and I have started
  90. writing some Gemini-exclusive content for it. I've also written some software
  91. you're welcome to use:
  92. [**libgmni**](https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmni),
  93. [**gmni**](https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmni),
  94. and [**gmnlm**](https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmni) are my suite of Gemini client
  95. software, all written in C11 and only depending on a POSIX-like system and
  96. OpenSSL. libgmni is a general-purpose Gemini client library with [a simple
  97. interface](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmni/tree/master/include/gmni). gmni is a
  98. cURL-like [command line tool](https://drewdevault.com/gmni.1.html) for
  99. performing Gemini requests. Finally, gmnlm is a line-mode browser with a rich
  100. feature-set. Together these tools weigh just under 4,000 lines of code, of which
  101. about 1,600 are the URL parser from cURL vendored in.
  102. [**gmnisrv**](https://portal.drewdevault.com/gmnisrv.gmi) is a high-performance
  103. Gemini server, also written in C11 for POSIX systems with OpenSSL. It supports
  104. zero-configuration TLS, CGI scripting, auto-indexing, regex routing and URL
  105. rewrites, and I have a couple more things planned for 1.0. It clocks in at about
  106. 6,700 lines, of which the same 1,600 are vendored from cURL, and an additional
  107. 2,800 lines are vendored from Fabrice Bellard's
  108. [quickjs](https://bellard.org/quickjs/) regex implementation.
  109. [**kineto**](https://portal.drewdevault.com/kineto.gmi) is an HTTP-to-Gemini
  110. gateway, implemented as a single Go file (under 500 lines) with the assistance
  111. of ~adnano's [go-gemini](https://sr.ht/~adnano/go-gemini/) library. My Gemini
  112. blog [is available through this portal](https://portal.drewdevault.com) if you
  113. would like to browse it.
  114. So dive in and explore! Install gmnisrv on your server and set up a Gemini space
  115. for yourself. Read the feeds from
  116. [CAPCOM](gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/). Write some software of your
  117. own!