So, why bother with a dated and limited protocol? Different people have different reasons, here is a brief summary of some of the more common ones: • The limitation to plain text makes for a quiet and uniform visual environment. A web page doesn't have to be visually noisy, but they frequently are. Gopherspace is therefore much calmer. Calm is a rare commodity in today's environment. It also allows one to focus on the content. • Gopherspace is entirely non-commercial. No-one is trying to sell you something or track your behaviour so they can sell your information to someone else who wants to sell you something. (There's nothing that forces this, and back in the day there were occasionaly advertisements on Gopher, but marketers aren't interested in small populations on antique protocols.) It attracts people who are refugees from social media (or hold-outs who never adopted it in the first place). • It's efficient. A page of plain text is a few kilobytes. A web page can be efficient, but they are often not. Even well-designed pages with scritps and images run to hundreds of kilobytes, and megabytes are not uncommon if there are videos (adverts, say). (This has practical advantages if one is using a limited device over a slow link, and one might contemplate the energy being spent transmitting and processing content of little interest to the viewer in many web pages.) • It's simple. In a few minutes you can learn all you need to about how to create readable plain text documents, and one or two things to know about creating gopher links. Even the most basic HTML authoring will take perhaps twice as long, and producing a page acceptable on today's web is a specialist skill. • It's simple (II). The protocol is so simple a decent programmer could produce a simple client in a weekend. Many people have written their own. Contrast this with a web browser, which is a massive software engineering effort these days. This has endeared itself to programmers of a DIY mindset. So, a protocol for technology hipsters, in other words. Here are some perspectives: (TXT) My personal take (TXT) Kagu Tsuchi's take (TXT) Cameron Kaiser's 'Why Gopher is Still Relevant' (TXT) Bjorn Karger's Gopher Manifesto ________________________________________________________________________________ Gophered by Gophernicus/3.0.1 on Debian/10 x86_64