Gemini and Gopher
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Categories:
[Tech]
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[IndieWeb]
I’m familiar with Gopher from back in the 90s. I think I looked into it at the time but I never actively used it. The Gemini protocol was created around 2020 and is kind of a successor to Gopher. I often come across discussions of both while exploring the independent Internet.
I’m interested in trying them out, particularly Gemini, to see what they’re all about and what people are building with them. I’ve tested a few Gemini clients like Amfora and Bombadillo, and poked around Geminispace a little.
Two things have happened that finally got me exploring Gemini in more depth. The first was the release of Lagrange for iOS. The second was a series of articles on Gemini from Brennan.
Lagrange
Lagrange is a graphical client for browsing Geminispace. The desktop version has been under development since around 2020, and in February 2026 an iOS version was released on the Apple App Store. I heard about the iOS version a few weeks ago.
Lagrange on iOS is a great app. It’s exactly what I need, a Gemini and Gopher client that runs on my iPad. I do almost all of my Internet reading on the iPad, following bloggers and other RSS sources with NetNewsWire and Current, and Lagrange makes it easy for me to move between all these sources: the Web, Geminispace and Gopherspace.
Lagrange renders pages beautifully, has browser-like features like tabs, bookmarks, history and others, and can subscribe to Gemini and Atom feeds. I like that it supports Gopher because there is a lot of overlap between Gopher and Gemini users.
The desktop app is also great, and I use it on Linux. But I’m on the iPad most of the time, and it’s more convenient for me to use the iPad app.
Brennan
Three recent articles from Brennan also helped me get going with Gemini.
In the first two articles he documents the history of these protocols and surveys the many information sources and software tools available for exploring the alternative Internet. In the third article on creating a Gemini blog, he provides a guide to hosting services and gives detailed instructions for creating your own Gemini capsule (a capsule is a collection of pages).
Between Lagrange on iOS making it easy for me to browse Geminispace, and Brennan’s comprehensive guides, I have everything I need to explore Gemini and try creating a capsule.
Do We Need Gemini?
I read a 2022 article from Marius, Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst, about why Gemini is a bad idea. It’s true that we could just strip down web sites to text and achieve the same style and appearance as with Gemini. Sites like the ones on the 512KB Club already do something like this. So why do we need a new protocol?
It’s a good question. My thoughts on this are a topic for a separate post, but I guess my first response is, why not? Why shouldn’t we use the Internet for experiments? Are we sure that HTTP browsers are the only things we’ll ever need? I suppose Gemini is isolating in the sense that only more technical people get to participate, but why is that a problem? People with a common interest are getting together to try something out, and maybe something useful will result.
In a follow-up post, Marius suggests that Gemini might attract extremists flocking to “cabal-like communities”. I have to admit that I worry about that too. I don’t want to be involved with a place where the worst kind of people hide out. I don’t use Reddit and don’t know about the questionable groups supporting Gemini that Marius refers to, so all I can say at the moment is that I haven’t come across anything repulsive yet. So far the material seems similar to what I see on other Indieweb blogs. With a lot of interesting ASCII art.
SDF
I decided to try hosting a Gemini capsule on SDF, the Super Dimension Fortress. Brennan has an article on that too: A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress.
But I’m going to stop here, because I think this article needs to be broken into multiple posts. In my next post I’ll document my experience getting set up on SDF and creating my first capsule.