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Introduction

I just arrived in the Republic. This is my first phlog here. This is also my first writing in english for a blog or a phlog. I am sorry for all the future mistakes I will certainly do.

As everyone here, I prefer minimalism than big and bloat. I discovered Gopher only a few months ago. In the 1990s, I think I never used it. Perhaps because I was living at five kilometers from the CERN in Geneva… which is quite far away from Minnesota.

I like it for simplicity, for dealing with plain text and for the focus it brings on reading, through uniformity of presentation and lack of images. I feel for a long time that surfing on the web is not really reading. It is often like watching a movie with the forward acceleration and just playing some parts of it. I like serendipity in the web surfing, but I think it is important to keep other techniques to get information through internet in a more hierarchical and less rhizomatic way. Surfing is like gaming: it is very pleasant, but it is more time consuming than really efficient in any serious purpose.

I have a self-hosted website in french with pelican static blog engine. I recently copied the material to a self-hosted gopherhole.

During the first weeks I was exploring Gopher, I just used Veronica search engine to find Gopherholes and the whole thing seemed to me fragmented, abandoned and quite empty. Then I discovered the Pubnix communities like SDF or Circumlunar and realized that this world was on the contrary quite active and living. That is why I joined one of them.

I will keep my french phlogs on my self-hosted server and try to write some words in english here from time to time.