Geminaut | Devpost

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Inspiration:

The web is a truly wonderful thing, connecting the world together while surrounding us everywhere we go. Despite this, there are hidden 'gems' of websites on the web that are not normally accessible through standard browsers... Specifically, small and niche websites hosted on the Gemini (not Google's AI LLM) protocol are not normally accessible via https browsers, yet may contain very unique and valuable information from indie devs across the world. The current means of accessing Gemini protocol websites is very lackluster with immensely poor structure and usability, so with our goal to promote discovery, we sought out to build a solution.

What it does

Geminaut is a browser application that provides better accessibility, navigation, performance, UI/UX for viewing the web via the Gemini protocol, while also promoting discovery for new small and niche webpages (such as blogs).

How we built it

The backend is powered by Golang, acting as an HTTP server that handles Gemini URLs, parses Gemtext, and returns a clean JSON DOM representation. For the frontend, we used Next.js with server-side generation, ensuring blazing-fast performance. We wrapped the app with Electron, allowing it to run seamlessly as a desktop application, and styled it with Shadcn, giving the interface a sleek, responsive feel. The result is a fast, efficient, and visually polished browsing experience for the Gemini space.

Challenges we ran into

We experienced numerous challenges in the attempt to build a browser from the ground up. The largest challenge was the lack of initial knowledge related to niche web protocols. Some of the minor inconveniences we ran in to were bugs related to nextron (electron) rendering two separate instances of our browser instead of one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we are immensely proud of building a sophisticated backend and browser application that handles niche web protocols.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about how different web protocols work, how we can build a browser from the ground up, and how we can generally improve user experience on the web.