I was talking about Gemini here some time ago, and the official website. As part of the “official” resources there was a mailing list to discuss the protocol, make announcements, meet other users, trolling, and things like that; but something happened to it –there are some comments of being dead and not coming back–.
Some people immediately recovered a copy of the archive and put it online, and even there were some attempts of adding a “public inbox” to replace the mailing list, but it doesn’t look like they went too far.
And then seems like things moved to comp.infosystems.gemini –I don’t know the full story, looks like the newsgroup was already available–.
Of course that the Usenet newsgroups still exist and they are used –even if is not as much as in its golden days–, and you need access to an NNTP server to read and post messages.
Those services used to be provided by your Internet service provider when you got Internet access, and Google has a gateway via a web interface via Google Groups –that’s a Wikipedia link because Google requires account–. Anyway, I’m not going to do a history lesson here.
So, how do I access the Gemini group?
Turns out it is easier than it used to be, thanks to this public news server:
Aioe.org hosts a public news server, a USENET site that is intentionally kept open for all IP addresses without requiring any kind of authentication both for reading and for posting. In order to avoid mass abuses, every IP address is authorized to post no more than 40 messages per day.
So basically I added a newsgroup account to Thunderbird and it 2 minutes I was checking the groups available, which is all of them.
What a time-travel experience! You don’t get all the archives, but it was fun checking that the es.comp.os.linux.* groups were still there – “ecol” is a big Spanish community of Linux enthusiasts that wasn’t that different of today’s tildeverse, established on 1996–.
The Gemini group is active, but like Gemini itself, things are slow-moving and it doesn’t have a lot of traffic. I have spent some time checking groups, and there are some that look active, but to me it feels more like the echoes from the past, like the “ecol” groups.