[rcarmo]

I wrote a server for it a while back (am still running it someplace behind a CF tunnel) but I’ve never really found either the community or the protocol were taking off:

https://github.com/rcarmo/aiogemini

A key issue with the ecosystem (not the protocol) as far as I’m concerned is that it would have been stupendously better to settle on Markdown (even a simplified form) for content creation. The rest is OK, I guess, but it’s just a nuisance to maintain “dual format” sites.

(I see a few comments here about the community’s opinions and leanings, but to be honest it’s not any weirder than your average old-timely IRC channel or fringe Mastodon server—-live and let live, read what you want and just skip Antenna listings you don’t like)

[uamgeoalsk]

Being able to parse gemtext line by line with almost no context is a big win for simplicity - you can't really do that with markdown.

[Avshalom]

It's not like by line but djot was designed to be parsed easier/more efficiently than markdown while being basically as featureful and ergonomic.

[blueflow]

It is possible if you restrict yourself to an subset of markdown. It works pretty well, actually, i have two awk scripts that take in a subset of markdown and generate either HTML or LaTeX.

[uamgeoalsk]

Sure, that's fair! In any case, I personally prefer the aesthetics and the readability of gemtext to markdown (especially when it comes to links!)

[Etheryte]

Pure ascii text is also a subset of markdown, so it doesn't really say much that it works for a restricted subset.

[fallat]

Uh, how much simplicity do you really gain? What's an instance of needing to backtrack?

[hombre_fatal]

You can have "[click me][1]" at the top and then "[1]: https://example.com" at the bottom. You wouldn't be able to render the link until the whole document was downloaded.