The small networks
The smolnet: the "small internet": is a loose family of protocols that deliberately cannot do most of what the web does. No scripting, no tracking, no advertising, no layout engine. A page is text with links, and a client can be written by one person in a weekend.
Unseen Servant serves five of them plus a web mirror, from one content tree. So the question is not which one you have to pick, but who you want to reach and what you are willing to send in cleartext.
At a glance
NETWORK SERVE IT IF... COST Gemini you want a living community and feeds the default Web mirror anyone with a browser should reach you one line, same tree Gopher you want durability and an older room one line, cleartext Spartan you object to mandatory encryption one line, cleartext Nex you are part of that scene one line, cleartext Finger you want a status line, not a site one line, separate
Everything but Gemini and the web mirror is off until you enable it.
Gemini
Clients: Lagrange, amfora, Bombadillo, Offpunk, gelim, Elpher, Kristall.
Gemini is deliberately, permanently small. The specification is capped by design so that a person can write a client in a weekend and no vendor can make it complicated. Encryption is mandatory; cookies, scripting and tracking are not merely discouraged but absent: things the protocol cannot do rather than things it asks you not to.
Best for: a personal site read by people who chose to be there. It is the only network here that can authenticate a reader, which is what makes gated areas and remote publishing possible at all.
Reality check: the liveliest of the five. Feeds work, aggregators such as Antenna will pick you up, and Lagrange is genuinely pleasant to read in. Start here; you should need a reason not to.
The web mirror
Clients: every browser you already have.
Most people cannot open a gemini:// link. The mirror means your address works in an email footer, on a CV, or in a post, search engines included. It is the same rendered tree, so it costs a listener and nothing else: no second site, no synchronisation, no build.
Best for: reach.
Turn it off if the point of your capsule is that it is not on the web. That is a real and respected position.
Gopher
Floodgap, the living hub, over the web
Clients: Lagrange, lynx, Bombadillo, Offpunk, BFG, Overbite for Firefox, plus web proxies.
Gopher thinks the internet is a filing cabinet you browse, and it has not changed its mind since 1991. Documents are reached through menus rather than through links inside prose. That refusal to evolve is the point: clients written in the nineties still resolve menus today.
Best for two things Gemini cannot offer.
Durability. Something you publish now will very likely still be readable by software nobody has touched in decades. Gopher has already survived the entire lifespan of the web.
A different room. Gopherspace is not a subset of Geminispace. There are people there who never moved, with their own aggregator, their own search, and their own culture.
There is also a hardware argument: gopher clients exist for machines that will never speak modern encryption.
The catch: menus are a navigational structure, and prose reads less well through one than gemtext does.
Reality check: by far the largest of the cleartext networks: hundreds of active servers, including Floodgap, SDF, bitreich and the tildeverse. Spartan and Nex reach a rounding error by comparison.
Spartan
The Spartan specification, over the web
The Spartan specification, over Spartan
Clients: Lagrange, Offpunk, gelim, Profectus, BFG.
Spartan is Gemini's document model with the cryptography removed. Its argument is that mandatory encryption is ceremony for public documents: clocks that must be roughly right, libraries that must be maintained, hardware that must do the arithmetic, and that a plain document deserves a plain protocol.
Best for: somewhere encryption is a genuine burden, such as a local network or a very small machine. Or because you find that argument persuasive. It serves the same gemtext unchanged, so it costs you essentially nothing.
Reality check: a few dozen sites. The specification has been finished and stable since around 2021.
Note: Unseen Servant refuses Spartan uploads permanently. They are unauthenticated by construction, and Titan already does uploads properly.
Nex
Clients: gelim, BFG, Profectus.
Nex is the smallest thing that still works. No status codes, no content types, no headers: send a path, receive bytes, the connection closes. It is explicitly telnet-compatible, so you can speak it by hand.
Best for: enjoying that an entire protocol fits in your head, or hand-rolling a client in an afternoon.
Reality check: the smallest audience here, and you will likely need a specific client to see your own work. Serving it is a gesture more than reach, which is a perfectly good reason, and roughly why much of the smolnet exists.
Finger
Clients: Lagrange, Bombadillo, BFG, and the finger command that ships with many systems.
Finger is the internet's oldest status update. It answers "what is this person up to?": the .plan file, which predates blogging by decades and does the same job in four lines.
Best for: a now page with no page. One command, a few lines back.
In Unseen Servant it does not serve your content tree at all: it answers with a short generated profile and points at everything else.
Note: finger forwarding is refused, as RFC 1288 itself recommends. Answering user@host queries turns a server into a relay for probing hosts that would not answer the asker directly.
New to all this?
The fastest way in is one client that speaks several protocols, so you can wander between them without installing something each time.
CLIENT SPEAKS KIND Lagrange Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Finger, Titan graphical, friendliest Bombadillo Gemini, Gopher, Finger, HTTP terminal gelim Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Nex terminal, line-mode Offpunk Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, HTTP terminal, offline-first BFG Gopher, Finger, Nex, Spartan, Gemini terminal, widest lynx Gopher, HTTP already on many systems
Try Lagrange first if you want a window with fonts and images; Bombadillo or gelim if you live in a terminal. Nothing here is an endorsement: these are simply the clients that exist, as verified in August 2026.
Before you enable any of the last four
Gopher, Spartan, Nex and Finger are all cleartext.
- No confidentiality. Anyone between you and your reader sees what was requested and what came back.
- No integrity. Anyone on that path can change it in flight.
- No server authentication. A reader cannot tell your server from someone impersonating it.
- No client authentication, ever. These protocols cannot do it.
Serve only content whose integrity loss is acceptable. Unseen Servant enforces the sharpest edge of this for you: content behind a certificate zone or a Titan zone is excluded from every cleartext tree when the tree is built, and a configuration that would publish gated content over one of these protocols is a startup error rather than a warning.
The counterweight, honestly: this is the settled norm of these communities. Gopher has run in the clear for thirty-five years, and publishing public static documents is the one workload where that is defensible. The mistake is not serving cleartext: it is serving the wrong things in cleartext.
A reasonable default
Start with Gemini plus the web mirror: the living community, and reach for everyone else. Add Gopher when longevity or that community appeals. Add Spartan if the no-encryption argument is one you actually hold. Add Nex and Finger because you like them.