Why Gemini matters

~naan96

This is my (overdue) post in which I outline why Gemini is so important as promised in my previous (and first) post.

The first reason is the very low CPU and RAM usage. For example, the Qt-powered Kristall client (or browser) [1] uses about 40 MB when displaying midnight.pub and about 50 MB when displaying a gemlog on the Zaibatsu colony of circumlunar.space [2]. CPU usage is 0.00% on my quad core Kaby Lake Refresh based laptop when displaying that gemlog and peaked at about 3.5% for a moment when loading it. When scrolling Kristall does use 6-12% CPU on my machine, which is, however, comparable to what QTerminal uses when scrolling through some package manager output. A terminal-based/CLI client would almost certainly use even less RAM and be much more useful and pleasant to use than its web browser equivalents such as w3m are on the 2020s web. But why does this matter, you may ask? Even my fairly old Kaby Lake Refresh laptop, quite modest by x86 PC standards, still has plenty of CPU power and RAM to relatively easily handle almost all of the modern web after all. One consideration would be that it makes Gemini more suitable for use on battery and solar powered hardware as a result of lower power consumption. A valuable quality in many situations, such as when the power grid is generally unreliable or only functional according to a limited schedule as is the case in certain Global South countries (e.g. Lebanon [3], Cuba, Pakistan [4]). But even in the Global North events such as natural disasters can lead to extended power outages, which will only become more common as climate change progresses. Another consideration is being able to use "old" hardware (single core and low performance multicore machines with 2 GB RAM, or less, unable to handle most of the 2020s web). That both helps combat the rampant e-waste problem in the West and means low-income people unable to afford newer hardware (whether in the generally wealthy Global North or generally impoverished Global South) can access information through the internet that their devices would not be able to display if part of the 2020s web.

And because Gemini also displays well on small screens, it could even act as a modern replacement for WAP [5] on today's feature phones (unfortunately the TLS dependence means old 2G/3G feature phones would not be able to support a Gemini client), which may seem fanciful but given the existence of Gemini services providing access to weather forecasts and news scraped from the web is only really a T9 keypad optimized Android or KaiOS client away!

The second reason why Gemini is valuable from a practical perspective is its extremely low bandwidth usage. This makes it suitable for use on Freifunk-esque community networks, bypassing or replacing the internet altogether, especially if such a network were to use HaLow WiFi (802.11ah) [6] to economically expand its range at the cost of lower data rates (bandwidth). I will leave it up to the reader to imagine the benefits of such networks, particularly combined with Geminispace. Similarly it is possible to envision (partial) archives of Geminispace being shared through Bluetooth and displayed with the assistance of special clients.

The third reason is that it is relatively easy to write Gemini servers and clients. This means that there are already a variety of independent servers and clients available today and as long as the interest in Gemini remains at least at the current level we can expect more to appear in the future. This is very different from the situation the web is in with the dominance of Chromium. And thanks to Gemini deliberately being non-extensible a situation such as the 2020s web is in where a dominant and powerful player is constantly pushing extensions of dubious value that leads to all competitors or alternatives eternally lagging behind is impossible. Because the server and client programs are relatively small and simple, they are also relatively easy to port to alternative operating systems and those ports will not be nearly as hard to keep up-to-date and functional as Chromium or Firefox. Furthermore, there are clients and servers written in different programming languages, so there are clients and servers written both in languages with clear advantages of traditional programming languages such as C and C++ and highly portable ones written in C or C++. In other words, we will not end up with a monstrosity such as Chromium that is required to display certain web pages properly and that is a nightmare to port to and keep running on an alternative OS or Firefox that is dependent on Rust, which causes issues on certain platforms.

The fourth reason is obviously the privacy that Gemini offers. There is no JavaScript code to track you and probably not much of a way to fingerprint clients. The lack of scripts running client side and auto-loading images or videos is also highly beneficial from a security perspective as no untrusted binary data or code is handled by the client without user interaction. Especially if using a Gemini client written in a safer language than C or C++, one can be far more at ease than one would be browsing the web as a result of both the privacy and security threat being a fraction of what it is on the 2020s web.

I feel obliged to mention that my thinking on some of the matters I discussed here was influenced by Solderpunk's exploration of permacomputing and the writers at Low Tech Magazine.

You can contact me through Session (ID 059c8db512ddd4af47f3d5a03dc01c651f04b0be53f6bdb99213b58e94da950133) to share your thoughts regarding this or any of my other (including future) posts or suggestions.