Happy birthday, Gemini!

Last summer I had been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing in my phlog on the subject of improvements which could be made to gopher, as part of a wider conversation which was going on in the phlogosphere at the time. I wanted to keep following that train of thought, but I knew that not everybody in the Gopher community was interested, and I also didn't want the subject to steal too much focus away from the other things I had been happily phlogging about for years. So I decided to start an entirely new section of my gopherhole, and announced in my phlog that I would be sticking all future posts on the matter of new protocol design there, in a separate space for those who wanted to follow it. In the same announcement, I gave the thing a name for the first time: Project Gemini! I made that announcement on June 20th, 2019.

=> Project Gemini announcement

At the time, I honestly didn't consider the project anything more than a thought experiment. I was genuinely shocked when I heard just two days later on June 22nd that Sean Conner had gone and actually implemented the damn thing and setup a publically accessible Gemini server at gemini.conman.org. I'm no less surprised to be writing this message one year later in the knowledge that Geminispace is just shy of one hundred public servers! The enthusiasm that Gemini has attracted and the growth that the community and the space have undergone in the past year has exceeded my every expectation.

I would like to say "thank you" to everybody who has contributed to Gemini in a small way or a big way in this time. Thanks to everybody who has helped shape the protocol through discussion on the mailing list (and thanks to the generous host of this mailing list!); to everybody who has written a server, or a client, or any other software; to everybody who is running a Gemini server; to everybody who is producing content for Geminispace; and to everybody who is helping to spread awareness of the project.

We've come a long way in the past year, and I think we can rightly be very proud of what we've built. Now that the fundamentals of the protocol have solidified, I am very excited to see what we can achieve together as we start to shift focus toward building both static and dynamic content in our new space: the Gemini journey has only just begun.

Onward and upward!