Vulpes

It’s worth noting that HTTP itself has unparalleled performance for the Web due to the protocol itself (and web servers that deliver it) being optimized over the years to support compression, transfer encoding, encapsulation, etc.

Gemini also transmits a mimetype that’s text-based (text/gemini) but it runs on port 1965 — as opposed to the usual 443 (HTTPS) or 80 (HTTP) that Web browsers usually connect to by default. Gemini therefore needs customized “browsers” that will read the protocol and parse the data that’s received from a Gemini server, however there are Web Proxies that do this as well [0].

In that sense, it’s an alternative to the Web inasmuch as it’s an alternative to HTTP; but (importantly) without any maturity, performance, or scalability whatsoever.

Now to be fair, Gemini doesn't claim to replace HTTP in any way; being a niche, small-web technology.

But in my opinion it's pretty pointless since it uses a strict subset of the HTTP spec which makes it feature-delimited by design.

Using HTML sans CSS/JS will give you a similar yet better experience.

[0] https://proxy.vulpes.one

Mastodon and Pleroma are home to many communities filled with people like this! One of my favorite instances, Merveilles[1], is probably among the highest quality in terms of the people themselves and the projects they work on, but there are dozens of others with similar energy. Make an account somewhere[2][3] and see for yourself!

Oh, and if you're willing to leave the Web, there's also Gemini[4]. Here are some proxied links to aggregators, CAPCOM[5] and Spacewalk[6], where you can find all sorts of people writing about their intimate personal projects, technological and otherwise (although mostly technological).

[1]https://merveilles.town/public

[2]https://joinmastodon.org/

[3]https://pleroma.social/

[4]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

[5]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/

[6]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/spacewalk.gmi

The lack of inline links is less about aesthetics and more about predictability. When you request a gemini resource you know that there will be two things happening: a TLS handshake followed by, hopefully, the server response (hopefully with your requested document).

Adding images requires more requests and breaks the concept of "one url/document == one request". I love that I know that my client will do nothing I do not tell it to do.

If you want to use gemini and you want inline images I believe https://proxy.vulpes.one does inline images of some form or other.

That said, images have other issues beyond causing page loads/requests to be unpredictable: they are an accessibility nightmare (as we have seen on the web).

I'm also going down that rabbit hole and I think the experience is mostly about getting out of a single mainstream cultural narrative and to increase cognitive diversity. This can be achieved by either watching movies from multiple different cultures or from completely different era. I've opted for both, and I've started writing reviews on my gopher[1] about the (mostly B&W and silent) movies I've been watching. I can clearly say, some of these are so impressive that they make contemporary movies (particularly Hollywood) look like slapstick jokes with a single plot.

[1] gopher://g.nixers.net/0/~vnm/classic_movies
Also available on proxies such as: https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/g.nixers.net/0/~vnm/classic_movies

IMHO you could just use

# Page title

# 1. First heading

and go from there. The format is meant to be human-understandable, not machine-readable.

But your point is a good one, and made me wonder how the documentation of Gemini itself handles the issue. And behold, the Gemini FAQ [0] itself has the first level 1 heading as

## 1. Overview

and the second one as

# 2. Protocol design

That's really disturbing once you notice, but I'd wager that hundreds of people have read the page and not noticed.

[0]: https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

It doesn't work though, and hasn't for a while, and likely never will [0]:

Timeline loading blocked

Instagram is refusing to provide data to this server.

This server will only be able to load the first page of timelines.

This error is permanent.

[0]: https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-17-future-of-bibliogram.bliz