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Nathan Galt mailinglists at ngalt.com
Tue Feb 23 09:38:35 GMT 2021
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On Feb 22, 2021, at 11:38 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 07:16:26PM -0500,
Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote
a message of 178 lines which said:
Gemini *is* an expansion of gopher, not
a reimagining of the web. Citing primary sources here (Solderpunk himself):
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/pondering-whats-inbetween-gopher-and-the-web.txt
It's no secret, of course, that I love gopher.
While the historical debate is very interesting (I wasn't there, and I
love to learn about how things became what they are), it does not help
a lot with current discussions such as "should we extend Gemini with
this or that?" I guess (just a guess: no social scientist made a
serious survey of geminists yet) that most geminauts today never used
Gopher and even do not know about it. They want something better than
the Web for some usages and they do not refer to an old protocol.
Gemini faces a strategic issue: is it a system for a few Gopher
nostalgics or is it something that may be presented and promoted to a
wider audience? (No, I don't target "world domination".)
This assumes, of course, that Gemini isn’t fine the way it is.
I only used Gopher a tiny bit back when it was a contender, but every time I’ve looked at running a Gopher anything I’ve run away in disgust and fear from the hard-wrapped 80-column lines with the leftmost column taken up by line-type directives. I wouldn’t even know _how_ to write pages like that without going bonkers. Gemini, meanwhile, is _very_ familiar to someone who’s written HTML and Markdown: Write text files, upload via scp.
Sneering at Gopher fans isn’t particularly helpful here.