Project Gemini

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Name Collisions and Project Naming

  • Many comments focus on “Gemini overload”: Google’s AI, this protocol, and other uses make the word ambiguous.
  • Several note this protocol predates Google’s LLM (started ~2019), so blame is split on who is “cluttering” search results.
  • Broader gripe: tech naming in general is uncreative, collisions are inevitable, and big companies dominate name meaning (“Amazon” example).
  • Tangent discussion on internal codenames, boring vs whimsical names, and the perennial difficulty of “naming things.”

What Gemini Is and How It Works

  • Described as “modernized Gopher” or “a radically stripped down web stack.”
  • Technically: a client sends a one-line textual request over TLS; the server returns a MIME-typed response or error, then closes the connection.
  • Gemtext is a very simple, line‑based hypertext format, roughly like minimal Markdown; easy to implement and render nearly statelessly.
  • Positioned between Gopher and the Web in complexity: heavier than Gopher, lighter than HTTP/HTML.

Philosophy and Appeal

  • Core goals: simplicity, privacy, non‑extensibility, and defense against the modern web’s bloat, tracking, and JS-heavy pages.
  • Fans enjoy “smallweb” vibes: cozy, low‑noise reading, often via desktop clients like Lagrange; some run gemlogs, social-style services, and even a Gemini “Wayback Machine.”
  • The separate protocol acts as a gatekeeper: only people strongly motivated by minimalism and privacy tend to show up.

Discovery and Ecosystem

  • Discovery works via search engines, directories, feed aggregators, and webring-like linking between “capsules.”
  • There are multiple clients and servers, some HTTP proxies, and search/crawl projects indexing thousands of hosts and ~1M documents.

Design Choices and Controversies

  • Strong restrictions: mandatory TLS, no inline images or embedded media, no inline links, no styling, no file size or range requests.
  • Supporters say the value is in what you can’t do: no JS, no tracking pixels, trivially simple rendering, predictable UX across sites.
  • Critics argue these constraints are “stupid by today’s needs,” make art and rich documents awkward, and limit adoption; several wish for HTML 2/4 + no JS instead.
  • There is tension over clients that add optional features (favicons, auto-fetching images); some call this spec-violating, others see it as practical.
  • Some complain about the per-request TLS handshake overhead and lack of connection reuse.

Critiques of Messaging and Broader Context

  • Multiple readers say the front-page 100‑word intro is vague motivational fluff that doesn’t clearly convey “it’s a protocol + text format.”
  • Broader lament about the modern web: browsers becoming “publishers’ agents,” DRM in HTML, erosion of user control, and speculation about attested, locked‑down future clients.
  • For some, Gemini is a nostalgic, principled refuge; for others, it’s an unnecessary NIH reimplementation that Gopher or “simple HTML” already covered.