THERE seems to be a common misunderstanding if not a myth that Gemini (and Gopher) sceptics use to bash the well-meaning efforts of the fast-growing Gemini space -- a space that we've quickly joined (and grew inside) this month. Gemini is exciting not for the "number of features" or "number of users" but its simplicity. It's fantastic for information preservation and it can integrate -- using some growing body of software tools -- a Web CMS such as Hugo. Statically-generated Web sites can be a lot easier to maintain, especially in the long run, and Gemini typically fits in just fine as a replacement with feature parity. By means of external linking, for example, Gemini can be combined with image viewers/editors and media players. Privacy can be enhanced that way. Memory footprint and CPU usage is also vastly decreased. It's good for the environment, unlike some new book from a mass polluter with four personal aircrafts.

"...they say they combat "misinformation", but in practice what they often -- and probably increasingly -- resort to is censorship of suppressed (embarrassing to those in power) information."In the video above I compare the Web to Gemini and explain what we've done in our capsule so far and how it can be accessed/used. We'll try to make at least one article and/or video about Gemini each day because the missing piece isn't some "must-have" feature but public awareness. It's not exactly helping that fetching a Gemini browser/viewer is rather difficult on GNU/Linux, albeit we expect that to change quite soon.

We're now close to converting the entire site (starting with the blog component) to Gemini. We're more than halfway through and and we'll soon be done; then we can do the same for wiki pages, albeit wiki pages would need to be regenerated over time because they're dynamic by nature. We also plan to publish the code, which is in a self-hosted Git. The way things stand, the capsule is largely self-updating (to keep up with the Web site) in the same sense that IPFS uploads are now managed automatically and bulletins are put together every night using a script. We hope to share the tools we've created to foster adoption of these protocols, which are in some sense superior to the Web (IPFS, for example, is more robust in the uptime sense).

When we started this whole effort it was done partly in order to tackle censorship by the EPO, seeing that Benoît Battistelli sent several law firms to threaten us and seeing that António Campinos has blocked this site for over 2.5 years. Resistance to facts on the Web is a growing problem; they say they combat "misinformation", but in practice what they often -- and probably increasingly -- resort to is censorship of suppressed (embarrassing to those in power) information. ⬆