I still think Gopher (the protocol that is) is still very relevant today. The beauty of it really is in its simplicity. Great to see that the library I wrote all those years ago is still being used :D
I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.
The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?
Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less,
do yourself a favour. Run
unset LESSOPEN
or have it at ~/.profile.
Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.
On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.
As a start, there's:
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://sdf.org
For gemini,
gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.
'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.
You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
stargate.gemi.dev:1994
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.
For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.
I still think Gopher (the protocol that is) is still very relevant today. The beauty of it really is in its simplicity. Great to see that the library I wrote all those years ago is still being used :D
https://pkg.go.dev/git.mills.io/prologic/go-gopher
I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.
Maybe they are passionate about themselves??
gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.
The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?
- https://geminiprotocol.net
- https://reticulum.network
Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less, do yourself a favour. Run
or have it at ~/.profile.Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.
On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.
As a start, there's:
For gemini, 'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.
Why ? It is not owned and controlled by billionaires. Plus no AI slop being spammed to gopher sites.
FWIW, the same applies to gemini protocol.
Same applies to HTTP too though