💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181106 captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:38:11.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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By way of an introduction to this phlog, I recently discovered that people are still using gopher. So I started exploring gopherholes and phlogs. So far, I really enjoy the following characteristics of gopherspace: * the general absence of hyperlinks in documents. The reading experience is so much more calm, since once you start a document, no further interaction is typically required. * gopher works with lynx! I have been a lynx (and pine) user since 1997. Over the years, the headers and links that populate the beginning of web pages have grown, making the entire experience of reading pages on a text browser quite onerous. There's a lot of scrolling and of course, significant portions of sites don't render at all owing to the widespread use of javascript. But gopher pages still render beautifully on lynx. * the community feeling. Gopher brings me back to my first experiences with networking/internet (dial up into Bulletin Board Systems, the local Freenet, and then my university's UNIX server). I loved the creativity and personal nature of what people were doing on those BBS's and the web. The web today is commercialized and populated by a different type of person. Gopherspace looks to me to be a lot like the internet of the 1990s. That's a compliment to all of you. Next time, I'll write about my interests, which will likely guide the direction of my little piece of gopherspace.