Tinyblogging with Gemini

An's Tinylog on Gemini, via Laika portal Note that you might need to solve a challenge/hit reload if you see an error the first time you visit. This is a best-practice attempt to keep gemini space free of inhuman crawlers.

I have recently decided to start exploring Gemini, a reboot of the venerable Gopher protocol that predated the web. The best way I can describe hanging out in gemspace is: quiet. slow. manual. In a good way. You can hear yourself think.

To get this going I'm going to start writing a tinylog, which is a little bit like twitter/bluesky/mastodon except... not. Updates are slow, everything is editable, there are no length restrictions but there is no media. There are no notifications, there are no follower counts, you cannot "go viral" on a service that doesn't exist. This is just "hi, what's up" into the universe.

You should probably access gemini using a gemini browser but because I'm me, I couldn't help completely over-engineering the thing. The basics of a tinyblog are simple: it's a single text file written with a sharply reduced subset of markdown called gemtext. That's it.

But then I went and built the Laika Gemini Portal with a feed viewer. The feed resembles a social media feed (it even has threading!) because I think that's a decent way to view content like this. It's all client-based though, there is no infrastructure for pub/sub, there are no accounts, there's no pingback. It's really just text under the hood.

It's weird, I don't know if it'll stick, but it's fun running down this path a bit! If you want you can read more about Laika here.