> Nothing about the web implies heaviness

Yes, except that heaviness is allowed, and lightness is opt-in.

> you’re also free to use e.g. Lynx/w3m/elinks browsers to browse the modern web or the subset that renders well on it.

Yes, except you have no way of known if and when something you want to search for will work on these. Whereas anything on Gemini will work on Gemini.

Ultimately to some extent it's an anti-bloat guarantee. Yes not all of the normal web has bloat, but that's not the point. To use a Genetic Programming analogy, it's the difference between not even considering program trees beyond a certain small size, vs having elaborate strategies for countering the inevitable program of bloat once you start dealing with programs of sufficient interest and complexity. But if you want to end up with programs that only consist of less than 10 instructions that you can reason with easily, then perhaps a "small world of small programs" is exactly what you want. And the natural content that fits this "small programs / small world" guarantee is personal thoughts and atomic websites. Which makes for an interesting webspace.

I shut down my server the other day after people on HN were sharing horror stories about runaway bandwidth bills. I could not find a good (easy) way to ensure that my gemini server shuts down if hit by DDOS. I want to set it up again, but need to find some place to host it that has a guaranteed maximum bandwidth cost.

It is rather easy to have one running alongside the other and the gemtext syntax is such it is quite easy to make automatic converters. Did you encounter issues maintaining both?

I mean I truly believe anyone can do small websites using HTML standards so for the actual content producer Gemini doesn't have much appeal. On the other hand using Gemini provide the users/visitors a guarantee they will not end up following a link and ending up in a bloated, privacy and ad nightmare. So I think it is sane to offer that even if you believe in small regular web.

When I was younger, I thought Gemini was very cool mostly because it was an alternative protocol to the mainstream. It made me feel very inner-circle in the development world, for some reason.

As I've grown, I've come to learn I'm a very visual learner. I've learned that "clear is kind", and for many, image and text are both important, but many images have a way of conveying what is difficult to express in words without being overly verbose.

I agree, illustrations are an essential part, especially when teaching something.

I found it funny that they propagate the no image thing and the screenshots of android clients showcased some sites that did ascii art and other ways to "fake images".

Yeah - images are an integral part of the www.

Some clients have a setting to inline images, or/and a shortcut to do so on the current page. Most clients can display images when the user follows a link to one. So images are quite useless as decorations (as most will probably not see them) but if an article contains useful images most users will be able to see those.

The Gemini protocol does not mandate lack of images. It is simply left up to the implementation to decide how (or whether) to display those.

One of the most popular Gemini browsers, Lagrange, shows images inline once downloaded. But you need to click their link to ensure you want to see the content first.

E.g., view this in lagrange to see what I mean: gemini://8by3.net/~xkcd/

Gemini has images, just by default the gemini protocol is designed to not download and inline them, though many gemini browsers allow auto inlining of images. There is no specific line format for them, they are just another link line pointing to an image.

Only in the same way the nano editor should rename itself to Stable Diffusion because of Google naming their image generator nano-banana.

Gemini predated Google's Gemini by many years and was a sufficiently known project. Google hijacking known project names is a thing which keeps happening for some reason.

"A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web"

was published 5 years ago with 347 comments

The difference is you can actually access it today without fear of being thrown back in 2025 by doing such a simple thing as following a link on the same protocol.

I believe that's the entire point.

TLS. Beyond that, as little as possible is basically the goal.

> Simpler

> Human Scale

> Distraction Free

> Privacy Protecting

Similar to the indie web/slow web movements, it's genuinely a shame that these qualities are essentially anathema to the business model of so much of modern social media.