Gemini Roots
------------

It's really great to see Gemini mentioned and noticed outside of the
pubnix/tildeverse/gopherspace/circumlunar communities.  It comes up on
Hacker News and lobste.rs quite frequently these days, I've seen it
mentioned on Hackaday too.

Of course whenever it comes up, comments overflow with enthusiasm and
skepticism in +/- equal measure. This is natural and good. What
frustrates me however is the number of negative comments and blog
posts that seem to base their criticism of Gemini's perceived
limitations on the mistaken assumption that Gemini aims to provide a
stripped-down web experience.  From this perspective, the opposition
to inline links and images seems a bit puerile and contrived.

What's lacking here is an understanding of Gemini's development
context: it was a project designed and driven by people interested in
a cleaner and slightly more modern Gopher, not a stripped-down
WWW. [1] These people were/are already happily using Gopher heavily
but were inspired to play with improvements to some of the more
antiquated aspects of it.

It's a very simple fact, but often overlooked and, I think, very
important in order to understand precisely which group of people
Gemini aims to satisfy.

Context is everything.

---
[1] The official FAQ supports both interpretations, but does say
that the "souped-up" Gopher interpretation is "probably more accurate."
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
.