💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 428 captured on 2023-11-04 at 14:02:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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super-controversial!!! j/k I love wee gopher

~enteka

OK, Gopher, you win

On the Gopher vs Gemini vs (small) WWW, I'm choosing Gopher. As for why not the web, you probably can guess the reasons. So let me skip that point. As for Gemini, well, it's kind of half baked at this point. The protocol is not really finished and while it kind of works it has quite a few rough edges here and there. On top of that, I really cannot see it is much better than Gopher. True, Gemtext is easier than gopher maps, but once you learn it, you learn it, and it's not like gopher maps are that difficult. And most of the time I just use plain text anyway.

gopher://enteka.xyz

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~rosie88 wrote:

I did try gopher for a while last year during the lockdown but recently found gemini and found gemini a lot easier but to be honest I may hop back onto gopher and keep both gemini and gopher just because I am a geek like that.

~tatterdemalion wrote (thread):

I prefer Gemini, but I think Gopher is a good backup.

The advantages of Gemini over Gopher:

TLS is part of the standard, rather than a non-standard extension.
Error responses have error codes, rather than you just having to guess.
Content-type is part of the response, rather than part of the link
Gemtext is a document format with links, whereas gophermaps are really only supposed to be for menus; the non-standard 'i' type gets abused for turning them into documents.

Advantages of Gopher over Gemini:

Works with retrocomputers that aren't capable of TLS
Implementations may have few or no dependencies

In general, I think serving the same content over Gemini and Gopher is cool and good.

~pink2ds wrote (thread):

I agree about Gopher maps. What I really like about Gemini over Gopher is the TLS.

~starbreaker wrote:

Gopher is fine, too.