Gemini, a modern protocol that looks retro

Who?

When?

Stéphane Bortzmeyer
stephane+fosdem@bortzmeyer.org
FOSDEM, 7 february 2021

Gemini, a modern protocol that looks retro

What’s wrong with the Web
Pervasive surveillance,
Slowness,
Little choice of browsers,
Distraction above content.

Why?
Partly because excessive complexity.
Too much information sent (User-Agent:,3-rd party
resources, cookies. . . ),
Too much code to run,
Cannot develop a browser from scratch,
Too many things to prioritize form over content.

Possible solutions
Block the worst (ad blocker, restrictions on cookies,
NoScript. . . ),
A lightweight browser (lynx, Dillo. . . ),
Common limits of these approaches: you cannot know
in advance if it will break the site or not.

Gemini does it
Gemini is separatist: new protocol and new format,
Simple protocol, not extensible : no cookies, no headers
(User-Agent:. . . ),
New format (gemtext) very simple: subset of
Markdown. No pictures, no hyperlinks,
Back to Gopher? No, we have URI, TLS, UTF-8. . .
Saves energy, too!

Demo 1

The command-line tool Agunua

Demo 2

Running manually the protocol

Gemini software
Ease of writing software is one of the goals of Gemini,
Indeed, it worked, everyone, and his cat, wrote a client
or a server,
All programming languages including Fortran, Prolog
and assembly language.

Take me to your leader
Today, the written specification is “almost” done,
Governance is simple, the founder, Solderpunk, decides.

Isn’t it too brutalist?
No cache control,
Do you like TOFU?
Can users live without images?
Translating existing content without hyperlinks.

Is it suitable for retrocomputing?
It runs on low-end machines (Raspberry Pi 1),
But not on 8-bits game console :-)
TLS and Unicode require resources,
More low-tech than retro,
If you really need retro-computing, you may use Gopher,
Gemini tries to be usable in 2021.