What Is Gemini and Why Would Anyone Use It?

If you hear the word Gemini now, you probably think of Google’s AI product. That is understandable, but it is not what this post is about. This Gemini is an Internet protocol: a small, deliberately limited way to publish and read documents online. It sits somewhere between Gopher and the web. That is not a perfect description, but it gets the basic idea across. Gopher was simple and menu-driven. The web became flexible enough to carry documents, applications, video, commerce, tracking, advertising, and half the software industry. Gemini tries to recover the part where a person publishes something and another person reads it, without bringing along the rest of that machinery. A Gemini site is usually called a capsule. You do not visit it with a normal web browser. You use a Gemini client. The addresses begin with `gemini://` instead of `https://`. The pages are usually written in Gemtext, a plain markup format with headings, links, lists, block quotes, and preformatted text. It is…