Several internet communities, from retro-computing enthusiasts to advocates for IndieWeb, decentralization and data sovereignty, are proposing and implementing application protocols that are intended to live alongside HTTP (or the seminal Gopher, for that matter) but are simpler and allow the user to focus on the information sought, rather than the presentation. Gemini is the best-known of these, and possibly the most thoroughly specified: a minimalist, inextensible, read-only application protocol with cryptography support and even its own hypertext format, Gemtext. Other protocols provide different features, such as data upload (Titan, Spartan) or a more flexible approach to content negotiation (Nex), but all ultimately share the same philosophy of a functional Web that doesn't need bloated clients to run.
Chaykin tries to follow that spirit by offering an application that can act as a Linked Data server in its own right, or as a proxy to existing Linked Open Data (note the "Open" here, though I very much hope that, if you choose to serve data through it, they will indeed be open data). With one instance of Chaykin, you can host a site (or capsule in Gemini parlance, or station in Nex-talk) that does both.
The contemporary Web is a far cry from the one we were promised: that should be before all our eyes by now. At the same time, Gopher site count is increasing. This suggests that those true to the traditional spirit of the Web are attempting to remediate the current situation through alternative protocols, without losing the best of the HTTP world. These brilliant minds, however, seem largely focused on the vernacular Web of Information, and yet the HTTP web has done something good in its evolution, such as enabling the Semantic Web of Data. Is it not worth doing something with it, without all that clutter coming from social media, monetisation and the like?
This is my way of answering "yes" to that question. With this project, I want to help bring the Web of Data philosophy into that world that stays true to the spirit of the Web of Information, whilst at the same time being a bridge to the better part of the HTTP web.
Lester Chaykin is a fictional particle physicist and the protagonist of Eric Chahi's classic video game Another World ("Out of This World" for my American friends). Much like Dr Chaykin is transported out of this world and into another, this project attempts to bring Linked Data out of the cluttered, HTTP-based web and into the dimension of the small web.
Another World was also fascinating through its many ways of being minimalistic: in the aesthetic (using cinematic animation on top of a bare-polygon 3D engine), interface (HUDless), and narrative (dialogue-free). Similarly, minimalist Web protocols are here used to host the beauty and complexity of linked data and knowledge graphs.
Finally, Another World was first released on the Amiga computer, and there are Gemini browsers running on AmigaOS with which you can now explore Linked Data too (running this Rust server on the Amiga might be trickier though).
Because I've wanted to learn it for long; because a significant chunk of Gemini software is in Rust; and because such a minimalist protocol calls for an optimised implementation, which I very much hope to someday deliver in this blazing fast language.
Because I do research on the applicability of the Semantic Web and because, if that wasn't clear already, I am a retrogamer--and a gaming historian in training, I daresay--and miss the thrill of the 1990's Web that was largely there to support the likes of me. So there.
DOI of a panel at Hypertext 2023 where I made my case: 10.1145/3603163.3609074