Honest question, how do you discover interesting content over this protocol? Is there people building the equivalent to web directories and web rings? Or search engines? What are the cultural expectations on navigating other people's published resources?
There are search engines, directories and feed aggregators [1].
Best means of discovery is like the original web, you surf it, bouncing from capsule to capsule finding what you like.
From what I remember about the name, it's derived from NASA space programs. Where Gopher is Mercury, Web is Apollo and Gemini is in between. Gemini is a new internet protocol which: - Is heavier than gopher - Is lighter than the web - Will not replace either - Strives for maximum power to weight ratio - Takes user privacy very seriously
I wonder how discovery and search work if it’s just a bunch of linked documents? Do search engines exist outside of Gemini and link into it?
There are several search engines of Geminispace, running as Gemini servers. There are also a number of feed aggregators that are widely used.
Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict
Ask Google, this project predates the LLM.
Fun fact: one of the first 10 bugs filed on the Go programming language was "Hey, I've been working on a programming language named Go for the last 10 years, please pick another name." https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9
I have got only two annoyance on Gemini, lack of inline links and _font styling_, and they are by design ( https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi#44-questions-about-t... ) It's fine for something like HN, but I heavily rely on named links and emphasis on all my blogs and is a dealbreaker.
If this is being developed, it should have a more modern description. Comparing it to Gopher is fine as a historical point, but comparing it to http/html is more useful today. I read the faq for geeks and didn't learn much: > 1.1.1 The dense, jargony answer for geeks in a hurry > Gemini is an application-level client-server internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for…
Ya, I still don't understand how this works at a high level. Does anyone actually understand how it works?
Given the amount of servers and clients people have written for it[0] I'd say there are definitely people out there who understand how it works. What don't you get exactly?
Back when I was a Googler, I used to play a little game where I would think of a random word and then check if there was a Google internal project code named for it. It was a bit hard finding stuff that wasn't some system or project, and often there would be multiple ones. I actually found one that I thought would be a nice name and reserved the go link for it, but naming anything after it never panned out, when I fi…
I reserved go/poop years ago, but the ability to name a project with that name is diminishing
What happens to your go links when you leave Google?
If this is being developed, it should have a more modern description. Comparing it to Gopher is fine as a historical point, but comparing it to http/html is more useful today. I read the faq for geeks and didn't learn much: > 1.1.1 The dense, jargony answer for geeks in a hurry > Gemini is an application-level client-server internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for…
Ya, I still don't understand how this works at a high level. Does anyone actually understand how it works?
A Gemini client is an application like a web browser, but simpler. It sends a one-line plain text request to a Gemini server over a TLS socket. The server sends back a document with a MIME type, or an error message, and closes the connection. The client renders the response for the user. That's basically it. It's similar to Gopher or to HTTP/0.9. A common document type returned is Gemtext, which is a text format like a simplified Markdown that can be parsed on a line-by-line basis.