02.21.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Gemini Space is Growing and Techrights is Growing in That Space
Not part of the space program, which it is named after (port 1965)
Summary: The momentum is building behind the Gemini protocol; we’re just early adopters of something that’s growing in terms of demand (because the Web is no longer suitable for many things)
TWO years ago we considered serving the site as a static site (no database, no backend processing in the so-called ‘dynamic’ fashion), albeit there are many downsides to such an approach in fast-moving (active) sites. Gemini lets us lower the weight of the site, escape the Web’s bloat, and also turn everything into a static page. Due to the nature of the simplistic (or simplified) syntax, once we convert a page to a static object in the capsule it is unlikely we’ll ever need to convert it again. We’ve been converting the site, article by article, in an ‘offline’ fashion (not on the server side but locally, on a PC). We’re uploading one or two years’ worth of articles per day and we’ll finish everything some time this week.
“Gemini will hopefully become as big and famous as the space missions.”Our goal isn’t to become the biggest capsule (even if that seems to be happening regardless) but to be a light and widely accessible platform. Based on the latest trawl of Lupa, in a page that requires Gemini to see (gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi
), we’re marching to the top as more years get added. The below numbers do not include more than half of what we’ve added since.
Being the largest space on Gemini or the broadest capsule doesn’t say anything about quality or about traffic, but each day we’re seeing and have seen growth. More people are entering the space, which saw major growth in recent months. Earlier today I was compiling a bunch of GUI clients for Gemini (there are about a dozen of them). We suspect it’s only a matter of time (not much time, either) before GNU/Linux distributions add some of these to easily-accessible repositories. Gemini will hopefully become as big and famous as the space missions. █