I haven't really put the effort into it necessary to generate a "following," which in the Gemini world really seems to just mean people emailing each other. That hits a nostalgia vibe for me.
A few things I've built:
- Kennedy - a search engine
- Gemipedia - A wikipedia proxy
- A clone of Worlde, a geography game
- A weather lookup service
I find the limits of it refreshing.
gemini://gemi.dev/
And it looks like Kennedy has indexed my gemlog, so that's pretty neat.
gemini://dungeonhack.net
How does Kennedy work? I thought Gemini was read-only.
> Status codes beginning with 1 are INPUT status codes, meaning:
> The requested resource accepts a line of textual user input. The <META> line is a prompt which should be displayed to the user. The same resource should then be requested again with the user's input included as a query component. Queries are included in requests as per the usual generic URL definition in RFC3986, i.e. separated from the path by a ?. Reserved characters used in the user's input must be "percent-encoded" as per RFC3986, and space characters should also be percent-encoded.
mid-90's web embraced weirdness and creativity. Primarily recognizing that we get so much info visually.
Gemini says: no, it's only text, no creativity or weirdness allowed. While I sort of understand where the authors are coming from, I think they threw the baby (or some of the baby) away with the bathwater.
Yes, some of this can be rectified by clients (like the insistence that images must be external), but clients can only take it so far.
I wonder if you're limiting yourself there.
Space Jam website it won't be https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
I built an entire geography guess game in Gemini. It uses images.
If I'm permitted a little plug: gemini://tozip.chickenkiller.com/ . I also run a gemini to gopher bridge, so the site can be assessed via the url gopher://tozip.chickenkiller.com/ Its works via a perl script I knocked together using inetd on FreeBSD. So if you like gemtext, but can't be bothered with the hassle of setting up security keys, then the bridge may be the way to go.
One idea for a cool project for Gemini that no-one seems to have done is a Twitter clone. What's interesting about it is that Gemini has the concept of an identity baked in, so you wouldn't need to register for an account to start posting.