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An alternative decentralized internet for sharing text and media: The Gemini Protocol
(geminiprotocol.net)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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gemini is a very ideological project, and if you don't buy in 100% it's pretty hard to use. sticking to html is a better idea in my opinion.
also your power figure is off by a factor of ten, an rpi needs 5W when running and up to 12 on boot which is why the official power supply is rated for 3A.
I agree because I don't really see the point. If someone wants to publish a page with content as simple as text/gemini, it is possible with HTTP and HTML too and it is available to much larger audience. If someone wants a reduced client, then NoScript or some minimalistic browser (Dillo or others) prevents the tracking and popups as well.
Technically, the identity management in Gemini is somewhat interesting, but it is certainly not a killer feature.
Effectively, I believe it mostly appeals to a minimalism aesthetic similar to suckless or STEPS. I like that but I don't see it changing the world.
That's incorrect. I knew what I wrote because I care about this and I researched exactly this when I built my own Gemini Server with a Raspberry Pi B. Such a server is the overwhelming part of the time idle. And when idle, the Raspberry Pi B draws around 360 Milliwatt, or 0.36 Watt.
Here are the measurements:
https://raspi.tv/2016/how-much-power-does-raspberry-pi3b-use-how-fast-is-it-compared-to-pi2b
And moreover, an USB power supply does not draw its rated power when the energy is not consumed (it can't physically, it would become quite hot). Powe supplies sold in the EU draw max 1 W idle due to EU regulations.
But even better, a Raspberry Pi connected to an Internet router like a FritzBox does not need an own power supply. It can be powered by the routers USB ports which are there for example to plug in flash memory sticks.
And this actually works well - that's how I built mine. So, it draws 0.36 Watt of power.
The question is, why do you state things here that are not true? Who would be interested in spreading misinformation on the topic of a decentralized, democratic from the base information infrastructure?
Oh, I see I made an error here:
The page I cited gives the power consumption in Ampere, it is 0.360 Ampere.
This is not, and this is what I overlooked, equal to the power consumption in Watt.
What applies here is the formula
where I is current in Ampere, U is Voltage, and P is Power in Watt. And while I is 0.36 Ampere, U is 5.1 Volt (see www.raspberrypi.com/products/power-supply) , so the real power consumption is
1.85 Watt (instead of "half a Watt").
The 5 A charger can deliver 25.5 Watt.
just going from experience. my pis tend to max out their power supplies unless they're oversized compared to the spec, leading to boot loops and brownouts.
Computers need more power when booting, because they are busy then and have a lot of input from starting processes etc.
The Raspberry Pis are no exception to this. And the USB specification provides the necessary power for booting.
In my experience, you might need more than the 3A power supply when booting a Pi when it is connected to more than one hard disk.
On the other hand, in a server process, the server is usually most time idle waiting for input, and working a tiny part of the time to respond to the input. That's especially true for the Genini protocol where the server mostly copies data from a file to the socket, prepending the MIME type and some essential header data. This is not computing-intensive. Also, a Gemini server can run fine from an internal SD card, say with 32 GB size. No hard disk needed.
What is causing confusion here is mixing the specified maximum power requirement with the average power required to run the server. And the power-hungryness of the "modern web" was what I was referring to (and I think this was not ambiguous).
The pi 1, 2 and zero all run on 1.5a power supplies perfectly fine. I have 2 running 24/7/365. So max power is 15w. They don't draw anywhere near that when idle, but mine are rarely idle.
a web server also spends most of its time idle, and the power loads are on the clients.
A typical web page today transmits many Megabytes of data for at most a few kilobytes of real information. And much if that data is unnecessary JavaScript code which executes on the client, costing bandwith and power - for the sole purpose of ads and tracking.
GenAI-geberated pseudoinformation uses even more power.
Gemini omits all that. That's why it is lightning fast (and far more comfortable to read, like an eBook).
I tried it but had to give up (a tad too technical for non-geek me), but I liked the idea a lot. That being said, I agree with you HTML (HTML and basic CSS) can achieve the same simplicity and lightness.
That's what I do for my blog (static, only HTML/CSS, no script, no nothing) and it works fine... within the usual web browser. I even occasionally post an image (very optimized, to reduce size and bandwidth usage, thx to the AVIF compressed file format)
Yeah but then you need a web server, complex config for it, security updates, and so on.
Gemini is far simpler and the reader has certainty that he/she is not served any advertising.
Don't you need one to host your Gemini files?
Two questions:
There is no security update to worry about with a static website (it's static, it can't run anything, there is no CMS, no script, nothing).
Far? You seem very willing to assert Gemini is simpler, I can hear you but don't forget repeating it doesn't demonstrate much.
For me, Gemini is a different and a very interesting take on static website publication, but it is still a static website generator and it certainly is not simpler.
At the very least because it requires a dedicated set of tools/software in order to make that website accessible to the public and another set of dedicated tools in order to access it.
On a much more personal level, take it for what it's worth it's merely my own personal experience: I consider it too complex for my level of 'expertise' as I failed to use Gemini properly (hosting it on the same web server I use to host my blog) whereas I have zero issue running a static HTML/CSS website on the same server. Note that it may also be I'm just too dumb to understand the magical simplicity of Gemini, I will happily grant you that possibility but at least I tried my best ;)
So, tell me how exactly is hosting a set of static Gemini pages is simpler than hosting a set of static HTML pages?
How so?
Like I explain on my own blog: I decided to support all costs of running the blog and to not display any ads, For the same reason I run zero tracking, and zero script (I have no idea who if anyone is reading my posts) because I don't want to spy on my readers and because there is already way too much ads everywhere online and I wanted to remind people of what the Web used to be before its corporate/marketing take-over.
It's a choice. A choice anyone anyone is free to do, or to no do.
Note that if Gemini does not support visual ads it doesn't prevent anyone to use textual advertisements or even to masquerade ads as standard content... One would obviously not get paid on clicks but there is always to get compensation. Like it’s too often the case in too many written press outlets: there is no click and no tracking on a print page, but advertisers do pay for putting ads in those.
edit: typos.
A gemini server only needs the folder with the public pages as configuration. Certificates are generated automatically.
Gemini uses a markup language which is simple - simpler than markdown (which is used on feddit).
It is described here:
https://gemini.flounder.online/docs/gemtext.gmi
It can be edited on the server with tools like midnight commander or WinSCP or notepad++. There exist a number of options how to edit these files on the server.
Or one writes it with a text editor and copies the files.
Well, I'd guess that 99% of WWW pages do advertising and tracking, and if you include personal pages on Facebook, Instagram and whatnot, it is probably over 99.99%. With Wikipedia and Arch Wiki as notable exceptions that comes to my mind.
In the meantime, exactly 0.0 % of gemini protocol pages do advertising and tracking. How come?
I'm not much into the guessing game. I'm also not a gambler.
I'm more interested in encouraging people to transition toward more open and more accessible technologies than preaching them to 'adopt' a 'we-the-happy-few' technology for not other reason than me fancying it (you may have noticed I did not mention the tool I'm using to create my static website: the tool matters not. It should not.)
I'm glad to know you've found whatever it was you were looking for in using Gemini. Alas, you have not answered any of my questions. Your conviction is just a personal opinion, it is not information or facts I can use to reconsider my own choices, and it certainly doesn't give me any hint on why Gemini would be a better choice than the tool I've been using so far.
As is using Twitter, Tesla cars, or Windows. These products are full of ideology and addictive design that works against us.
be serious. gemini has tons of intentional limitations that makes it only appeal to a small niche of a niche.
Gemini is fine for:
What it doesn't serve is the so-called attention economy.
The purpose of these limitations is to make it useless for advertising and user tracking - what the modern web does all the time. It is not a limitation aimed at limiting users but aimed at limiting corporate shit.
Same way as the lock at the door to your home has not the purpose to keep you outside, but the people outside which you do not want in your home.
if you fetch something from a server, you can be tracked. if you get presented content, you can be advertised to. it's a meaningless limitation.
Well this is what tech companies would say ;-)
But unless you deliberately visit facebook.com or doubleclick.com, you won't be tracked since gemini transmits a single document from a single site at a time, and it is purposefully made so that your friends and your tribe can run a server.
there is nothing stopping any server from tracking requests on the backend. there is also nothing that stops a server from transmitting that request info to a third party. in this way it's identical to http. it's also identical in that there is nothing that stops you from setting up a http server with no tracking.
And the thing is that the modern Internet is not built any more for this. It is a pure perversion of what Tim Berners-Lee wanted and created at CERN.
but gemini doesn't solve that. the protocol is not the problem.
You keep repeating that.
But tracking and advertising have certain technical requirements to techniques which the gemini protocol does not offer. For example linking to Facebook like buttons or Google Analytics or client-side Javascript.
Gemini does not offer that.
And if you think different, show me a single gemini website with ads.
You can start here, in a HTTP gateway:
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/
or
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/taz.de/?
or
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/geminiprotocol.net
it doesn't solve it because the problem is not a technical one but a social one. a malicious actor can still track and advertise to people. that doesn't mean it's happening right now.
the onus is on the protocol to prove itself.
Of course, Gemini is also a social endeavour. Such projects are created, nourished and grown by communities.
But technical decisions and design choices also embody values and political goals. You do not build nuclear weapons to combat world hunger and things like Facebook and Grok do not exist to promote democracy.
yes, and the values that gemini embodies are isolationism and conservatism by breaking away from the larger community, limiting contributors to the people who have the technical skills, and standardising on an intentionally incompatible version of a 30 year old protocol.
You seem to assume that intelligent humans are only capable of posting stuff on Xitter and Facebook.
Writing text in Gemini format is simpler than Markdown, which is what people are using here.
Reading Gemini context only requires a client, for example an Android app like Rosy Crow, or using a Web gateway, like https://gemini.tildeverse.org/ , or https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/ .
Publishing a Gemini blog requires at the minimum only to get an account at a pubnix server (such as the tildeverse servers above).
If one wants to self-host it, one needs only to set up a Rasberry Pi running the server program. The complexity is about the same as running a file sharing client.
Yet some people want to frame it as if the only way to participate in the Internet is to use Facebook and Twitter.
no, that's your reading of what i said.