I recently received an email from Casey Richins, who came across my capsule and decided to drop a line. In their email they asked me about my thoughts on gopher, and shortly thereafter (or thereabouts) they posted a gemlog about text-only formats, in which was a quick discussion on Gopher [1]. If you haven't already I suggest you read the post, it's a pretty good one about the merits of using text-only formats. There's a couple of cool weblinks in there too that I didn't know about.
[1] Casey Richins - For the Love of ASCII
Here's what I wrote about gopher:
So for gopher... I checked it out. ~szczezuja really got me into the history and there's a decent crowd in there. However, Gemini just seems cleaner to me, with more potential. Plus I don't have to figure out gopermaps, just markdown. I have a small goherhole on tilde.team but don't use it because I only need one place to post.
I do have some bookmarks in Lagrange for gopher and occasionally poke around for content.
Despite what I said above, shortly thereafter I started going down the gopherhole on my mobile. I realized all my bookmarks were gemini and only a few were gopher. One of the biggest reasons I was interested in exploring more gopher was that ~solderpunk was posting quite a bit more on there again after a hiatus. I also don't think all of their content was completely cross-posted to Gemini either. So off I went, going through sdf.org, floodgap, and veronica searches, making bookmarks on my phone. I came across a few interesting gopherholes, one of which was a phlog describing the refurbishing of old computers. I found it pretty interesting and very well written. I suggest checking out the Sharp X68000 Super remodel:
And a researcher working on climate processes and glacier mechanics. Where else could you find this?
Gophernews, a scraped, text-only news site of popular news outlets. No trackers, ads, or other garbage. Worth a look.
And of course hackernews:
And gopher reddit:
I mostly said it above - but I still have some searching to do. While I do enjoy going on Gopher for some of these items, I feel like I'm squarely a Gemini user, probably because that's where I got my start. I'm not a fan of gophermaps, and gemtext files just feel and look cleaner to me. I like the automatic wrapping of text by the clients (besides the ascii art) in Gemini, whereas in Gopher there's jagged line breaks and horizontal scrolling (at least on a mobile screen, like in Lagrange).
I don't dislike Gopher, I guess I just don't prefer it. I like that they're cousins;- protocols aiming to provide a text-only experience to those either preferring the simpler web, or those refugees like myself that were hoping for a brighter future than what actually unfolded on the web (ref: Solderpunk's "Orphans of Netscape").
My fear, and what I'm already seeing a little bit on Geddit, is that this space will get infiltrated by one group or another. If you're a fan of The Lord of the Rings, then you'll know what I mean when I say that Gemini and Gopher are kind of like The Shire to me. Yet, some of the clearly politically-angled posts/links on Geddit of recent show me that this place is far from immune. "Escape western colonialism" and "rt.com for privacy" (China and Russia state run websites, respectively). While I don't mind leftists airing their opinions, it just felt like unabashed recruitment for these entities, and it made me upset and a bit like the dirty web was here to get to us.
Anyways, I went off on a non-gopher tangent there, but I do plan on exploring gopher a bit more and hope to report back that I've found some even cooler things. Like ~caseyrichins, I don't believe I'll be maintaining a gopherhole anytime soon though since I just don't have the energy to keep both going. And besides I don't know what I'd write in the both of them anyway.
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2023-01-30
Tags: gopher
Gritty
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