Gemini, gophers, and fingers: alternative internets beyond HTTPS

But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger://, gopher://, and gemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet. None of them require a GUI. None of them require JavaScript. All three of them run in a terminal.

Brennan Day

I ran an OSNews Gemini capsule from my office for quite a while, but managing it from my own workstation computer became a little annoying and cumbersome. I should take a weekend off at some point and devise an easy way to convert our RSS feed into separate files for Gopher and Gemini and serve them from my Proxmox mini PC, if only to do my part in contributing to the success of independent protocols.