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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-02-18
I discovered Gemini and Gopher at around the same time, and before diving into Gemini space I spent a good few hours reading content on Gopher, which was quite good. However, I ended up hosting Gemini and investing in it due to a few factors, such as the novelty of it. It was nice that Gemini had suddenly found a vibrant new community, and there was also an explosion of software development and experimentation thatwas quite impressive.
The technical features that led me to choose Gemini were, specifically, TLS and UTF-8. Even without TLS, Gopher probably would have been fine for me, but I am a strong believer in Unicode. As it happens, the Unicode did come in handy as I did indeed begin hosting content in multiple languages. Other people have done the same, so it was certainly not in vain.
That being said, I think Gopher would have adequately handled like 90% of what I use Gemini for. Why choose, though?
It appears to me that Gemini and Gopher can cooexist quite well, and I'm sure for many they do. Bombadillo, one of the first Gemini clients, was (I think originally?) a Gopher client as well. The same goes for Elpher. I have noticed recently more and more clients seem to be adding support for Gopher. At least, that's the impression I got seeing source files like "gopher.c" pop up in source updates for mainstream browsers like Kristall and Lagrange. If they always had this feature, I hadn't noticed until now.
The thing is, I'm not used to using Gopher, so I don't really know what sites or pages to browse, but the fact that I can browse both Gopher and Gemini indiscriminately feels somehow like the right thing. I hope that people who joined Gemini Space for Gemini will also end up enjoying Gopher as well!