Tootik - A Gemini Fediverse Client | 🏷 research
Tootik - a gemini fediverse client
July 2nd, 2025
I was recently playing around with a program called Tootik. Tootik is a fediverse client, like Mastodon, but instead of being over https, it's over gemini. This immediately peaked my interest because I had been needing to move instances and this client even had a migration feature to make that easy. So I set up Tootik. It took a bit of fiddling with ports and settings but eventually I had my own fediverse server. I had previously attempted to set up Mastodon and I can tell you first hand this was infinitely easier. The dev, Dimkr, did an amazing job with the setup instructions on the github (which I will link). Once it was set up I ran into an hiccup real fast. The default settings only let one registration per hour and one post/edit per 3 minutes. Luckily this can be changed in the config, which is in nano seconds? Why? Whatever, that's an easy fix regardless I just used an online converter so I could use seconds and boom, were up and running. I made my account, which uses client certificates, closed off registration, and started posting. Tootik does allow you to change your user avatar and bio within the frontend which is awesome. You can't change your banner though but that is a non-issue for me. As for uploading posts, you can select the post visibility and type up, just like any other fediverse client. It allows file uploading via the Titan protocol but no images unfortunately. I hope that gets added eventually because even though you can't view images over gemini, other instances can. Speaking of, it does federate with other instances just like you would expect. You can follow and be followed, boost posts, lookup profiles, view mentions, etc. There isn't a like/favorite feature implemented but maybe that's not an issue. It doesn't have any kind of moderation front end so you'd have to go into the sqlite backend to remove users or posts. All in all, it's an interesting proof of concept. I didn't choose to stay there as my main instance but I am using it for my blog updates and notifications of my upcoming streams.
Thanks for reading this far, Breebee
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