The web has grown into something its creators never imagined — a tangle of trackers, JavaScript bundles, and cookie consent banners standing between people and the content they came for. But alongside this bloated web, a quieter movement has been growing: the Small Internet. Communities of developers, writers, and tinkerers are building spaces that prioritize content over chrome, using protocols like Gemini that deliberately resist the complexity of the modern web. The Geminispace has grown from 200k unique URLs across 750 gemini capsules in 2021, to 530k URLs across almost 5,000 capsules at the time of writing.
This talk is an invitation to explore that world. We'll start with the "why" — what's driving people to seek alternatives to the modern web, and what the Small Internet's philosophy of intentional simplicity offers to developers who spend their days wrestling with ever-growing complexity. Then we'll get practical. The Gemini Protocol, created in 2019, sits in a sweet spot between Gopher's austerity and HTTP's complexity: using a simple TLS trust mechanism and a markup language called Gemtext, it’s deliberately designed to resist feature creep. You'll learn how the protocol works, what Geminispace looks like from the inside, and how communities like Tilde servers carry on the collaborative spirit of early Unix.
The second half of the talk showcases how Python can be specially useful to interact with this space. Astronomo is a modern Gemini browser for the terminal, built with Textual, supporting Gemini, Gopher, and Finger protocols out of the box. It has rich Gemtext rendering, identity management, RSS reader, and full mouse support. It's the lens through which we'll explore the Geminispace.
On the server side, Xitzin is a framework for building Gemini applications: decorator-based routing, Jinja2 templates, and async support. A step-by-step walkthrough will show how to build a microblogging application from scratch: user accounts powered by Gemini's client certificate system (no passwords, no sign-up forms), posting through native input prompts, and threaded comments — all in under 100 lines of Python.
You don't need to abandon the web to appreciate what the Small Internet offers. Whether you leave this talk ready to launch your own Gemini capsule, contribute to a Tilde, or simply with a fresh perspective on what "simple" can look like in software, you'll walk away with working knowledge of a corner of the internet that many developers don't know exists, and the Python tools to start exploring it.