I recently found out about this thing called Project Gemini. It’s named after the NASA one, but is otherwise completely unrelated.
Though they claim not to compete with gopher or http, and simply want to co-exist alongside them, it is most easily described as a 21st century gopher. A protocol for transferring files, similar to http, but much more limited. TLS is required, and it is otherwise stripped to the bare minimum. There’s no user agents, no referral headers, not even content-length. Just host, mime type, url, data. Then there’s also a hypertext format that is actually similar to, but not compatible with, markdown. There’s no scripting or styling though. That’s up to the user.
The tooling surrounding it is functional, but still quite primitive. I think it’s going to need some development frameworks similar to Rails/Django/Laravel or at least Flask. It’s also going to need better browsers. The one I got for Windows works well enough, but required a separate installation of .NET framework and doesn’t even have tabbed browsing.
Even so, I kind of want to make GeekNights available on there. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Will we be the first podcast on there?
Surely this is correct in that it is unlikely to become a huge world changing web-destroying phenomenon without that kind of boost.
But I don’t agree that things that things which aren’t big enough to take over the world don’t matter. You can make a new first person shooter, but just because you don’t become as big as Counter-Strike doesn’t mean you don’t matter.
They specifically say that they have no aspirations of destroying either Gopher OR http. They’re just making a new thing, and people are actually using it.