Why I Love the Gemini Protocol
This site has a twin. Alongside the HTML version you’re reading now, every post here also gets published as a Gemini capsule — a mirror of this blog reachable over the Gemini protocol instead of HTTP.
What Gemini actually is
Gemini is a small, deliberately limited internet protocol from 2019, sitting somewhere between Gopher and HTTP in ambition. A Gemini server responds to a request with plain text formatted in “gemtext” — headings, links, lists, quotes, and paragraphs, and nothing else. No inline bold or italics. No embedded images. No client-side scripting, because there’s no scripting layer to have. Every link lives on its own line. That’s most of the spec.
It sounds restrictive, and it is — on purpose.
Why I read this way
I spend most of my day looking at software built to hold attention: autoplaying video, cookie banners, layout that shifts three times before the article loads. Gemini doesn’t have any of that, because the protocol makes it structurally impossible. A gemtext page is just the words. You read it the way you’d read a text file, because that’s essentially what it is.
I browse Gemini with Amfora, a terminal-based client. Everything is keyboard-driven — no mouse, no trackpad, just moving through links and pages the way you’d move through a well-organized filesystem. It’s fast in a way the modern web mostly isn’t anymore, and it’s brought back something I’d genuinely forgotten I missed: just reading, without being fought for my attention along the way.
A few other clients worth knowing about:
- Lagrange — the polished, cross-platform GUI option, if a terminal isn’t your thing.
- Kristall — covers Gemini, Gopher, and a few other small-internet protocols in one client.
- Bombadillo — built specifically for browsing outside the web entirely, Gopher included.
There’s also a real security angle here, not just an aesthetic one. TLS is mandatory in the Gemini spec — every connection is encrypted — but there’s no cookie mechanism, no JavaScript, no tracking pixels, no ad network with its own attack surface. The protocol is small enough that there’s very little room for anything to go wrong.
More to come
This is the high-level version. I want to come back to specific parts of the Gemini ecosystem in future posts — clients, capsules worth visiting, how the TLS trust model actually works, that kind of thing. In the meantime, this blog’s own Gemini capsule is live at gemini.sergio101.com — I’ll be linking out to other interesting spots in Gemini-space as I find them.