Gemini, RSS, and the small web
I still read most of my sites through a feed reader1, in roughly the order they were published, no ranking involved.
The protocols nobody asked for
Gemini is a small protocol built by people who wanted something between Gopher and HTTP: no cookies, no JavaScript, a document format so plain it barely qualifies as markup. It will never replace the web, and that’s fine — it isn’t trying to.
What I like about it isn’t the protocol itself, it’s what building on it implies: a handful of people decided the modern web was solving problems they didn’t have, and built something smaller instead.
Why this still matters
None of this scales, and that’s sort of the point. A blogroll, an RSS feed, a Gemini capsule — these are commitments to a web that’s read by people who chose to be there, not funnelled in by an algorithm optimizing for time-on-site.
I don’t think everyone needs to run a Gemini server. But keeping an RSS feed, linking to other people’s sites, writing a blogroll — that’s a low-effort way to keep the small web a little less small.
Notes
Not a service that tries to become my whole day — just a list, checked when I feel like it. ^