Feeling inspired by a recent post about solo tabletop games and motivated by a longstanding desire to put something besides a personal journal or copied blog posts out into Geminispace, I started a Gemini capsule at this domain.
You can reach it at gemini://historia.vg.
I’m going to expand upon the outline in that post and make it a little resourse to find interesting offline hobbies and activities. I think if you’ve gotten desperate enough to flee the internet for an afternoon into Geminispace, what you’re really looking for is an alternative to being online, so I think it’s an apropos capsule.
You (kind of) need a browser to access Geminispace. Gemini was sort of a covid-era fad and there was a flurry of development around 2020-2022, most of which has died off. I like just using the most popular, easiest thing most of the time. These you can get from the Debian Bookworm repository:
If you click around awesome-gemini, you’ll find half one-and-done browsers during the fad phase and, unbelievably, half tiny projects still being updated.
If you’re lazy, you can use an HTTP-to-Gemini proxy like gem.any-key.press.
While there are dozens of tiny Gemini servers, agate seems to be the most popular and active. It also has a Docker image, so you can just add the below to a docker-compose.yml file and be up within seconds:
services:
agate:
image: ghcr.io/mbrubeck/agate:latest
volumes:
- ./agate/gmi:/gmi
- ./agate/certs:/certs
ports:
- 1965:1965
restart: always
command: --hostname historia.vg
Put your gemtext (e.g. index.gmi) in the ./agate/gmi directory. It will even automatically make a self-signed cert for you if you pass it a hostname via the command. Really easy.
On one hand, the type of people who would use Gemini aren’t the type who you’re going to see on social media like Reddit and Youtube, so the community is not very obvious. On the other hand, the entirety of Geminispace is akin to a single Mastodon server. It’s not dead, but there’s only a few people “enjoying the quiet here”.
Some places to find activity are:
There are a lot of Hello World capsules.
There are a lot of capsuleers blogging about Internet Bad, Plaintext Good.
There are a lot of personal journals.
There are a lot of programmers and old computer geeks.
But everyone posting to the void is someone using Gemini in 2025, which means you probably have a lot in common with the few people there.
It’s a fantasy network for text supremacist terminal jockeys. Hoping Gemini is the future is like hoping PICO-8 is the future of game consoles because people are looking for simpler, less complicated games. But saying “Why not host an HTTP website without Javascript instead of a Gemini capsule?” is like saying “Why not just make a simple 2D game for Playstation 5 instead of a PICO-8 game?”. The limitations and simple tools are the reason the thing is desirable to begin with.
I’m certainly not a Gemini true believer and I wouldn’t even tell anyone it’s worth checking out but as someone who very much dislikes browsers, websites, and the gestures-vaguely state of computing, it’s nice to pretend we could somehow have this.