gemini(7) "The Anachronaut's Guide" "The Anachronaut's Guide"
gemini - information about Gemini
Gemini is a new (the project started in June 2019) application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective. Gemini may be of interest to people who are:
- Opposed to the web's ubiquitous user tracking
- Tired of obnoxious adverts, autoplaying videos and other misfeatures
- Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks
Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to weight ratio", while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will stay simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a "do it yourself" computing ethos. For this last reason, Gemini is technically very familiar and conservative: it's a protocol in the traditional client-server request-response paradigm, and is built on mature, standardised technology like URIs, MIME media types, and TLS.
(excerpted from gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi)
In order to browse the universe of Gemini "capsules" (the equivalent of websites), you need to use a suitable user-agent, or a proxy/gateway which allows you to use one that you already have installed (e.g. a Web browser like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge).
Much of the available Gemini content is plain text, suitable for browsing in the terminal. To help you get started, we have two Gemini user-agents installed here: bombadillo(1) and amfora.
If you wish to use a graphical client, you can install one on your machine. Gemini is a rather simple protocol, so a number of these are available, suitable for different needs. Here are a few:
- Lagrange https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- Geminaut https://www.marmaladefoo.com/pages/geminaut
- Kristall https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall
There are also portals (aka proxies, gateways) which allow you to explore Gemspace from your Web browser:
Of course, we have some content hosted here, at gemini://anachronauts.club, but you'll probably want to find new stuff. There are several aggregators for Gemini content which you may find useful:
- CAPCOM gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
- Spacewalk gemini://rawtext.club/~sloum/spacewalk.gmi
- gmisub gemini://calcuode.com/gmisub-aggregate.gmi
Additionally, there are a couple of search engines:
- GUS gemini://gus.guru/
- Houston gemini://houston.coder.town/
Hopefully this will lead you to content that you find interesting. And of course, you have the option to publish the kind of content that you want to see right here.
Publishing Gemini content here at anachronauts.club is as easy as placing files you want to publish in your ~/public_gemini folder, and making sure it's world-readable (chmod a+r filename). Files with the .gmi extension will be served as the text/gemini hypertext format, documented in text-gemini(5), which provides headers, links, quotes, and preformatted content.
We run "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" as our Gemini server, which will automatically create directory listings. You can override the default listing for a directory by creating an index.gmi file inside it, or you can add a header before the listing by creating a .mollyhead file containing the header content. Both of these files can be marked up as described in text-gemini(5).
Additionally, we allow you to set some server options on a per-directory basis using .molly files (Similar to .htaccess), such as directory listing order, required client certificates, MIME types, and redirects. See https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/molly-brown for more information.
Making a Gemlog is pretty straightforward; just create a file for each post, and a file with a list of links to the posts. You can make your easier to consume by formatting the links in the listing as follows:
=> post.gmi YYYY-MM-DD - TitleWhere YYYY is the 4-digit year, MM is the 2-digit month number, and DD is the 2-digit day number. There are a number of tools which can parse lists of such links as feeds, similar to Atom or RSS.
You can also create an Atom feed for your Gemlog. In the future, we will be providing a tool to create Atom feeds automatically, as well as a site-wide aggregator service.
While Molly Brown supports CGI scripts, due to some architectural issues with the server, we cannot securely allow users to run CGI scripts. We plan to resolve these issues in the future in order to be able to offer this service.
We do run a Web gateway, so content you upload is available in normal Web browsers. The gateway attempts to hue closely to the Lagrange browser in terms of how it presents content, with one notable exception: local links to files with certain image extensions (e.g. jpg/jpeg, png, gif, webp) will be rendered as inline images, with the link text as their alt text. (This technically violates the Gemini specification, but we assume that anyone using a browser doesn't especially care about multiple requests being made.)
At this time, there is no way to prevent your content from being served over our web gateway. If you are interested in such a feature, consider submitting a patch to our gmikit-gateway project. Note that there is no way of preventing other Gemini proxies from serving your content.
This document includes text written by solderpunk [email protected], taken from gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/