A modern successor to gopher, with some extra features to make it more useful in the modern day.
Gopher was a competitor to the early web. It had a distinction between contentful pages and link pages, so it was less flexible than the HTML based web. I'm pretty sure this is one of the things Gemini fixes
Gemini is because some people are sick of the modern web.
In the (idealised) olden days, the web was a place people posted content. An amateur could make a geocities that showed people their interests, an academic could have a collection of pages that acted as notes for their lectures, or a company could advertise the products that they sold.
In the (distopianised) modern days, the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted, but most of which offer at least some attractive distraction, whose primary purpose is to develop a small number of competing databases about you to maximise the amount of money that can be extracted from you while minimising the amount of value that can be returned to you. The providers of the computer programs take particular steps which should cause rational people to distrust them (e.g. hiding the button that says "Save my choices" to discourage you from doing what you want and what they are obliged to permit you to do), but healthy people can only tolerate so much distrust in their day-to-day life that they become exhausted.
Gemini starts with extensions to Gopher to develop something a little bit more like the first one. It acts as something like a safe space. It is based on a similar sort of principle to the black-and-white mode on a lot of modern phones, to discourage you from overusing it by making it less attractive. Although Gemini does support form submissions and CGI, the primary form of interaction as far as I know is to have multiple gemlogs.
(I tried using Gemini last year when it was mentioned in this place. But the content I want - e.g. programming language API documentation - is not on Gemini, and I think the Hacker News proxy is read-only, so I began to forget about it. I think Gemini is perhaps a little bit too far over.)
> the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted
Agreed, but Gemini does address the problem of surveillance.
All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks.
Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page.
> All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks.
That's the problem with the current iteration of the internet. If you run a Gemini-based hidden service, they go away.
> Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page.
That's the problem for the client to take care of. Those clients that aren't built with web technologies are unlikely to be subject to accidental web technology execution.
