Similar story here! A couple years ago learning about Gemini/gopher/smallnet from mentaloutlaw videos. So I joined a public access Unix server (first SDF later tilde.team) and learned how to write my own capsule site for a few years. Learned some basic .CGI bin and awk processing to create a gemtext to epub converter that made small ebooks of daily post in atom feed. It was like training wheels really helped prepare me for the transition to full self hosting capsule and website

Thanks for sharing! It was a good read. They have good points for security and clarity revisions.

A lot of Gemini spec choices were made to dissuade feature creep. Youre probably never going to do banking through Gemini but its also pretty much gaurenteed you’ll never need adblock either.

Gemini is appealing from the perspective of novice self hosters. Its simple enough that most people can set up a simple server and publish on their site within a few hours. Its minimality enforces maximizing the most reading content for least bits used. 95% of modern webpages isnt even for reading or reference its all back end trackers and scripts and fancy CSS. Newswaffle shows just how bad it is.

When I read through a gemtext capsule I get the impression I’m looking at something that was distilled into its most essential. No popups no adds no inline images or tracking scripts or complex page layouts. My computer connects to the server, I get back a page of text or an image of a zip file. Once and done.