Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers: Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

This article is not AI-model news, but rather a commentary on alternative internet protocols and small-web culture. Coming from an IndieWeb and decentralization perspective, the author critiques how today's web is highly dependent on a handful of browsers, the Chromium ecosystem, and large platforms, and reminds readers that the internet is not equivalent to "https://" websites. The article introduces, in sequence, three protocols that each have their own independent communities and aesthetics: Finger, Gopher, and Gemini. Finger, born in 1971, was originally used to query whether a user was online and their simple text information such as .plan and .project; the author treats it as a prototype of the early "status update" or personal profile. Gopher came from the University of Minnesota in 1991, using hierarchical menus to browse documents and directories, and once competed with the World Wide Web; but due to differences in commercial licensing policy versus the open strategy of HTTP/HTML, it gradually declined. The author points out that Gopher has not died — in early 2026 there are still hundreds of servers and millions of selectors. The Gemini protocol was launched in 2019 by Solderpunk, and is not Google Gemini AI; it attempts to address Gopher's lack of encryption, mandating the use of TLS, and is characterized by an extremely minimal specification, the Gemtext format, no JavaScript, no cookies, no tracking pixels, and no third-party resources. The article also discusses tools and communities such as gemlog, phlog, tildeverse, Smol Pub, Bombadillo, Offpunk, and Lagrange, emphasizing that these protocols can run on terminals and older hardware, lowering the barrier to participating in web creation. Overall, the author connects these small, low-resource, hand-crafted forms of the web to the values of solarpunk, public Unix hosts, anti-platform-monopoly, and anti-data-harvesting. For an AI reader, the important takeaway is actually one of recognition: this piece was caught by AI keywords because the title contains "Gemini," but its subject is web protocols, digital culture, and decentralization, not Google Gemini or any model release.