Gemini Wishlist


Things I wish Gemini could do:


Compression

I know it's been said before, but support for compression would be great on Gemini. Particularly because plaintext/gemtext compresses very well. What if clients could dynamically decompress "index.gmi.zip" or ".gmiz"? Or better yet, add support for compressed requests via URL?

Example:

gemini://FQDN/index.gmi -> text/gemini 
gemini://FQDN/index.gmi?zip -> gemini/zip or failback to text/gemini

Perhaps users would decide to publish full archive their capsule as Gempub that gets fetched in one go?


A Different Name

The term "Gemini" is ambiguous. It brings up all kinds of unrelated search results that obscure the protocol:


Besides "Gopher", most internet protocols use acronyms like HTTP, FTP, SSH and so on.


I would have gone for a name like, GTTPS that stands for GemText Transport Protocol Secure. It's like HTTPS, but the "H" has been pushed a step back to "G", get it?


A Killer App on Mobile

I would love to see a Gemini app that lets users edit and publish their own capsules from their phones.


It would have to work similar to crypto wallets: users generate their own private key and use decentralized protocols like IPFS to distribute content and IPNS to update the DHT (Granted it this is not fast, but bare with me).


When users bookmark a capsule, they automatically (and periodically) crawl, cache and mirror it (the equivalent of IPFS pin add or IPFS Cluser pin add?). And by default, only include gemtext or files smaller than 50 kB to avoid high storage consumption.


Now imagine 10 friends bookmarking each other's capsules. Chances are that their the capsules would be available for fetching throughout the day even when most phones are inactive or disconnected. At least in theory.


[Last edited: 2022-02-14]



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