On the question what are use cases for a Gemini server:
Gemini is kinda a modernized version to the old Gopher protocol. Its purpose is to share hyper-linked text documents and files over a network - in the simplest way possible. It uses a simple markup language to create text documents with links, headings etc.
Here is a FAQ
Main differences with similar technologies are:
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It is much, much easier to write hyper-linked documents than in HTML
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a server is much much smaller and easier to set up than a web server serving HTML. It can easily and securely run on a small Raspberry Pi without special knowledge on server security.
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in difference to gopher, it supports modern things like MIME and Unicode
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There are clients for every platform including Android and iOS
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also, there are Web gateways which allow to view stuff in a normal web browser
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unlike Wikis, it is only concerned about distributing content, not modifying files. This means that the way to store and modify content can be matched to the use case: Write access to content can be via an NFS or Samba server, or via an SFTP client like WinSCP or Emacs.
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Unlike HTML2, it does not support advertising, tracking, spying to users, and so on.
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the above two points mean that it does not need user authentication
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the protocol is text-centric and allows for distraction-free reading, which makes it ideal for self-hosted blogs, small projects or associations, or microblogs.
Practically, for example, I use it to share vacation photos with family.
Two more use cases that come first to my mind:
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When I did my masters thesis, our lab with about 40 people had a HTTP page hosted on a file server that listed tools, data resources, software, and contact persons. That would be easier to do with Gemini because the markup is simpler. Also, today it would not be feasible to give every student write access to a Apache web server's content because of the complexity of web servers, and the resulting security implications.
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One time at work, we had a situation with a file server with many dozens of folders, and hundreds of documents. And because all the stuff had been growing kinda organically over many years, specific information was hard to find. A gemini server would have made it easy to organize and browse the content as collaboratively edited hypertext which serves as an index.
still not sold on gemini. the project has sort of a holier-than-thou smell to it, striving for the sort of technological purity that makes it unattractive to use. i would still choose gopher.
Does it annoy you when people try and make stuff that matches their values?
More comfortable with the killings that FB contributed to in Myanmar or in the Philippines? Or attacks on democracy like this one?
The power concentration of the "modern" Internet has consequences - and not good ones.
But me personally, even if it would not matter to me what effects power concentration, targeted advertising, disinformation and so on have, it still would annoy the hell out of me that one cannot open some web sites on a two-year old medium priced smart phone because everything is stuffed to the brim with bloat and tracking.
what the fuck?
Definitely an overreaction lol.
But why are you not sold on Gemini? I mean, does it even need selling? Does Gopher need a selling point? They're both deliberately simple protocols that work basically only on text. Gemini itself was conceived as an alternative to the modern web, deliberately simple in most ways, but not as simple as Gopher.
the main thing is that, while gopher was designed under a set of limitations, gemini is designed off of a set of opinions. actively breaking backward compatibility is one of them i do not agree with.
of course it doesn't need to sell to anyone. people working on it presumably like it. the difference is that gopher predates the web, so its sales pitch matched that of the web.
gemini's sales pitch is that it's a simplified version of the web, which i can respect, but their choice of not making it a subset of a standard means that it fails to be a viable alternative to the web, because that standard is so ubiquitous.
But who actually still writes HTML by hand?
One could also argue that formatting web content in Markdown breaks compatibility and one should rather use HTML for formatting comments, because it is the standard.
The Gemini markup and protocol are designed to be simple, and the markup is designed to be written by hand. This gives you a workflow very similar to a wiki, without any extra infrastructure needed - and this is what makes a decentralized web possible. For normal people, setting up a standard web server for a small blog is too complicated, and costs too much time.
And for protocol conversion, there are gateways, much like you can access FTP or gopher servers in a browser.
i do, all the time. there was a time where everyone was putting up personal websites and doing basic html. the entire geocities wave is proof of that. it was already decentralised.
Lol, what's your problem, man? I thought you're supposed to sound convincing.