Gemini, a modern protocol that looks retro
Gemini: Back to the 1990s with a protocol and format to distribute real content, without tracking and visual effects. Stéphane Bortzmeyer explained what it is all about, how it works and how it differs from the modern world wide web in this 27 minutes long video presentation as Fosdem 2021.
Original story by Stéphane Bortzmeyer (at Fosdem 2021). Published 2021-03-24, Originally published 2021-02-07.
This work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium license.
Video Copyright Fosdem 2021. License: Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium
Many people are unhappy with the current state of the Web: pervasive user tracking, a lot of distractions from the actual content, so complicated that it is very hard to develop from scratch a new browser. Why not going back to the future, with a protocol and format focused on lightweight distribution of content? This is Gemini, both a new ultra-simple protocol and a simple format. Not to develop an alternative to YouTube but useful to access content with a minimal client. Gemini is not "retro" but it "looks retro".
The Gemini website is at gemini.circumlunar.space.
"Stéphane Bortzmeyer works at AFNIC, the domain name registry for .fr. So, he knows a bit about the DNS, and talked about it several times at FOSDEM. He also has a blog (almost entirely in French) https://www.bortzmeyer.org/ and wrote a book about the relationship between Internet infrastructure and politics https://cyberstructure.fr/
The speaker also wrote three RFCs about DNS, RFC 7626 (DNS privacy considerations), 7816 (QNAME minimization for privacy) and 8020 (enforce the tree structure of the domain names). When he is not reading RFCs or technical papers, he programs with Python."
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