I’ve been using Gemini for reading and researching on and off for the last few weeks. I like simple and efficient tech, but i also like eye candy quite a bit.
If you haven’t heard of Gemini, it’s an alternative protocol to http. It distributes text documents - like this one - with their own format, gemtext. In contrast to the web we all know, there is no CSS styling and no client-side scripting. All content that is not text has to be linked and can not be embedded. As a result you get a very lightweight - both PC/Server performance and bandwidth wise - and uncluttered reading experience, that consistently looks the way you want to.
You could argue, that Gemini saves on hardware and bandwidth resources, both of which emit CO2. What i like most however is the focus on the actual content. The document format, gemtext, looks similar to markdown, so webpage - or capsule in Gemini lingo - content can be crafted by hand. As reader you don’t have to fight any cookie banners and it’s very hard to get distracted.
I mainly use the internet to research scientific topics for my thesis during the day and reading blog & news in the evening. The latter works really well using Gemini. As expected, the techy smol web is filled with techy content, but - maybe rather unexpectedly - some nature and sustainability people seem to prefer the low tech solution as well. This makes for a lot of great content to read. Also quite surprisingly a german news paper i like to read hosts all of their articles on Gemini.
The researching part on the other hand is not that great. Most scientific journals and documentation for scientific software is only available on the regular internet. A wikipedia frontend called gemipedia exists (and it’s great), but not really compatible with maths and physics content.
I hope more scientific content somehow makes it’s way to Gemini, maybe using the blog parser with utf8 equation rendering i talked about last post. Until then i’ll happily use Gemini for all the great stuff that’s already there.
This site uses the wonderful Catppuccin color scheme.