There is the 90% of gopher that I am not familiar with. All the gopherholes out there I have never surfed to, that I do not link to. So, to rectify this, I have been actively surfing. Following links on sites I come across finding yet more sites. The floodgap server list is of course a good start for this activity, but you will find servers not listed there by following links from sites you do find there.
There are so many colonies. Cliques of persons who mutually link to each other, reply to each other's posts, and seem to comprise the gopherspace in its entirety for that clique. Other groupings seem more or less aware of the larger personalities in gopherspace stemming from large colonies such as the SDF. Sometimes the division is along language lines -- there is a large number of gopherholes in German, for example, and another grouping in French.
I have gotten some ideas for RPoD today, while surfing. The idea of possibly creating another gopherhole for a given purpose, hosted on a different port number of 1436.ninja. I may do this as an experiment and use the
of the website as the guinae pig. I have been planning on writing a cgi-wrapper for the RPoD-GPS for as long as it has existed. In a like fashion to how my Phlog works on gopher: write in markdown and an intermediate cgi app presents clickable links leaving the post. I am using apache_mod_hoedown for the RPoD-GPS, specifically to have footnotes so my wrapper will need to correctly present these.
Anyways, I know a lot of you do actively surf gopher looking for new servers. I have done this on and off over the years, but have not in a while. It was over due. I also need to go further down the rabbit gopher hole on a lot of servers that have large content collections. I have found that floodgap does not seem to return to a server after it spiders (sometimes?). For example, 1436.ninja, leveck.us, gopher.leveck.us, and rpod.leveck.us all point to RPoD. Floodgap came accross all these domains at different points in my gopherhole's existence. It reports each as having a different number of selectors (when they are all the same). I wonder if it only recording selectors for a (sub)domain where the link leading to that subdomain utilizes it. I do not have any idea. I toyed with running a veronica instance, but it is a huge resource sink. I ended up not keeping it active for very long. Maybe a dedicated Raspberry Pi with a 256GB thumb-drive as storage would be way to do such a thing. I imagine that that amount of storage would be sufficient for my lifetime (and be largely empty), unless we get some rather large binary-hosting gopher- holes running. RPoD runs on household DSL in rural Wyoming, and it is not super fast. My family would probably not like the bandwidth hit...
But I digress. The point was that if you do not surf gopher beyond the phlogs, you are missing out. The chans (I would never usually use that phrase, but these are hardly image boards) are another fun time if you are familiar with board culture. I know of three, but there are likely more. There are a LOT of www-scrapers out there. Which I am not conceptually a huge fan of (if you ask me), but if you actually watch me, I use the crap out of them. I lurk on sites. I am not a commenter. So, having a text-only, light weight, ad-free gopher version of HN, or /., or Lobsters, or what have you, is pretty damned handy. There are apps galore: recipes, cocktails, weather, games (text-based), searches of various things, you name it... (note to self -- it has been a while since I wrote a new gopher-fronted-something maybe it is time to make something).
Gopher is the girl you marry. She is not flashy, but is beautiful to you. She holds up her end of the relationship. Gopher will not leave you, won't be unfaithful, won't embarrass you in public. As the years fly by, your love for gopher only becomes stronger.
Yeah, the cringe quotient of RPoD was lacking, so I cranked it up a notch. Don't act like you disliked that...