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Dan Q's Gemlog

Contains selected posts from my blog, and ocassional content exclusive to my Gemlog.

Why Gemini?

Gemini's a real gem (see what I did there) of a protocol. All the beauty and elegance of HTTPS (pre-HTTP/2), all the simplicity of Gopher. Couple that with the minimalist joy of the Gemtext - which is basically Markdown - and you've got something really special.

Running a Gemini server isn't necessarily practical or sensible, but it's a statement. A statement that says: I miss the simpler Internet. The Internet where we were all encouraged to collaborate not by signing up to some or another huge and unethical social network but by creating and hosting your own content, in your own way.

We'll probably never see a Web that looks like that again, but Gemini is designed to resist efforts to commercialise it. You'll never see a banner ad on Gemini, because images aren't loaded by default. You'll never be haunted by tracking cookies on Gemini, because cookies aren't part of the specification and it'd be almost impossible to retrofit them into it. And you'll never get hit by a cryptominer on Gemini, because there's no scripting whatsoever on the platform: just simple, lightweight, mostly-textual content. And that's just great.

Selected posts from my blog

2025-12-01 HTTP is not simple
2025-11-18 I guess I'm never paying DreamHost back
2025-11-05 The Signal and the Noise is still excellent
2025-09-04 The Beer Token
2025-08-06 Internet Services^H Provider
2025-08-05 Part of the Internet, or connecting to the Internet?
2025-07-23 Lock All The Computers
2025-06-28 The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling
2025-06-09 Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella
2025-06-07 I Wrote the Same Code Six Times!
2025-05-21 Google Shared My Phone Number!
2025-03-29 Delivery Songs
2025-03-22 Feed Readers Beat Doomscrolling
2025-03-19 WebDX: Does More Mean Better?
2025-03-14 Work Slippers
2025-02-27 A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
2025-02-18 WordPress to ClassicPress
2025-02-17 Frustrating At Scale
2025-02-17 Queers make the world a safer place
2025-02-08 BBC News RSS... your way!
2025-02-05 Reading more rolled papyri
2025-02-03 BBC News RSS... with the sport?
2025-01-21 Sabbatical Lesson #1: Boundaries
2025-01-12 James Acaster's Classic Scrapes
2025-01-07 Entitled by Kate Manne
2024-12-12 Moving Three Rings' Servers
2024-12-01 99 Days of Blogging
2024-11-16 Sadder Than Fiction
2024-10-27 Hour of Ambiguity
2024-10-24 How I Learned to Enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch

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Atom feed for Dan Q's Gemlog

Elsewhere

www: Dan's main blog
spartan: Dan's spartan instance
gopher: Dan's gopherhole
finger: Dan's finger server
fedi: @dan@danq.me
email: gemlog@danq.me