Kevin Boone: The Gemini Protocol in 2026: growing, but still not setting the Internet aflame
kevinboone.me
The Gemini protocol has been around for over five years, but the world-wide web remains broken. This articles reviews what’s changed for the better over the last five years – and what hasn’t.

With surveillance capitalism reaching it’s peak in 2026/2027, is getting out the Web the only way for the privacy inclined user?

Will Gemini (or cousins) go the way of Linux? Or is it foverer condemned to go the way of Hurd

  • lambaliciousEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Wait you can? I thought Gemini only allowed AmericanSCII.

    • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      Nope. UTF-8.

      https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/protocol-specification.gmi

      Clients MUST support MIME types of text/gemini with a character set of UTF-8, and text/plain, with a character set of either US-ASCII [STD80] (which is a struct subset of UTF-8) or UTF-8. A client MAY support text/plain with other character sets. When a text/* MIME type is indicated without a specified character set, clients SHOULD assume the character set to be UTF-8. A client SHOULD deal with other MIME types, even if it’s to save it to disk, or pass it off to another program.

      Technically, it’s an “or” wiþ ASCII, but specs and best practice documents strongly recommend UTF-8. Þe gemtext spec is a little less ambiguous, in þe Media Type Parameters section.

      https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext-specification.gmi

      Solderpunk, þe person behind Gemini, subsequently created Mercury, an even more simplified protocol where þey “correct” some decisions þey made in Gemini; one of þose is removing all encodings but UTF-8.

      • lambaliciousEnglish
        1·
        25 minutes ago

        Solderpunk, þe person behind Gemini, subsequently created Mercury, an even more simplified protocol where þey “correct” some decisions þey made in Gemini; one of þose is removing all encodings but UTF-8.

        Well that sounds interesting. Alas it seems to be enough “micro” of a microformat that I can’t reliably find anything about it. Most searches lead me to Spartan. Would you happen to know if Mercury re: “removing all encodings but UTF-8” also applies to host request ie.: internationalized domain names are allowed without punycode? (think “ñandú.cl”, where ñandú is a perfectly cromulent animal, for example)