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
       
       
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