Setting up a Gemini server

My server is here. There's nothing really on it at the moment, but it exists.

gemini://gemini.spicyporkbun.online

Why?

I'm on neocities because I was looking for a small lo-fi community. Gemini and Gopher both fit that description and are well-suited to most of the content I produce.

There's a higher barrier to entry for these protocols, so the userbase tends to be more grown-up and techy. And because they're very simple, people must focus on primarily text-based content rather than style.

Why Gemini instead of Gopher?

I looked around on both communities using http proxies. There are links to server lists/aggregators on both of these.

Gopher proxy
Gemini proxy

Gopher has been around since the 90s, and it shows. My experience was that it was difficult to find interesting content, and a lot of content was only interesting as a time capsule (game hint manuals from 1994). Most of it consisted of cryptically named files and directories, and search results were spammed up with a bunch of "gopherddit" links (i.e. a reddit proxy).

Gemini has only existed since some time in 2019. The community is very small and recent. The aggregators offered interesting content immediately. It does feel a bit more 'normie' than Gopher, with its focus on 'gemlogs' (blogs) and quite a few emojis used in posts, but overall it felt a lot more welcoming and fresh.

Also, just a pointless personal reason: I hate gophers.

How?

I used Jetforce in Docker.

https://github.com/michael-lazar/jetforce

If you already have a domain etc, it's very easy to set up and start serving content.

I plan to at least mirror my text posts there. When there's some content I will get it added to server lists.