Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
The article discusses alternative Internet protocols beyond HTTPS, focusing on URIs and their potential for decentralization. It highlights three specific protocols: finger, gopher, and gemini, which operate without a graphical user interface. The author emphasizes the importance of exploring these alternatives to combat the dominance of major browsers and corporate platforms.
- ▪The article introduces alternative Internet protocols that do not rely on HTTPS.
- ▪Finger, gopher, and gemini are highlighted as protocols with their own ecosystems and communities.
- ▪The dominance of Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers raises concerns about the fragility of Internet monocultures.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | brennan.day |
| Canonical URL | https://brennan.day/gemini-gophers-and-fingers-oh-my-alternative-internets-beyond-https/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 17:24:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T17:38:02.410Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T17:38:02.410Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | c9O4Q5FbFmG3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Prodromus Astronomia, volume III: Firmamentum Sobiescianum, sive Uranographia, table DD: Gemini' by Johannes Hevelius. 1690 | Wikimedia Commons | Gemini badge by uoou Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS Brennan Kenneth Brown May 26, 2026 13 min read Last modified: May 27, 2026 In my last post, I announced that I created a bash tool for easier blogging in the terminal, inspired by the tildeverse. Today, I want to continue my discussion on visions of alternative Internets that are already being created. I want to talk about Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) schemes. Sounds boring, right? Or at least complicated, but it really isn't. URIs are just the protocols set for browsing the Internet.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at brennan.day.
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