GETTING THE GOPHER NP89 surprised me by being surprised: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7enp89/glog/20230828-someone_doesnt_get_gopher.txt In reference to this: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7ecardboard64/phlog/07-considering-leaving.txt I saw that Gopher hole by Cardboard64 years ago, possibly before I started (or put online) one of my own. I don't understand how it was hard to maintain - I find Gopher's popular presentation standards much easier to meet with minimal thought and effort than the web's. But I did understand the concerns over a lack of audience. NP89's idea that watching readership metrics on Gopher is not 'getting it' actually echos my own conclusions here (after an initial detour in the first section): gopher://aussies.space/0/%7efreet/phlog/2020-02-29An_Anti-Logging_Protest.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------ So here I am on Gopher. The fact that I'm here means that I'm jumping a new leap into obscurity. I kind-of suspect that paradoxically the average views for pages in my Gopher hole might be higher than for my personal website, simply beacuse there's less content on Gopher as a whole for Gopher-lovers to look at. But maybe that shouldn't matter. Maybe to consider that is really to miss the point in the first place. I'm here because I like Gopher (not least because it doesn't demand encryption), and to say things that I want to say, knowing well that they're often not popular opinion. Overall whether that attracts or repels people, it's what I'm here for. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I tried to be popular on the Web, and people ran away. Now I've got on Gopher, and I'm dug in to stay. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ------------------------------------------------------------------ I still like that little rhyme. The difference is that I definately wasn't expecting more views or engagement than "a mostly-text WWW", because my WWW didn't get much of those anyway (except for selling things, which definately drives up the email traffic but in a different way). But the point was still that there would be some audience here. While Aussies.space was offline I also did consider whether it was worth publishing these things publicly. From all the flash-in-the-pan type Gopher holes where there's a burst of initial posts then silence, I suspect what NP89 considers "not getting Gopher" is quite possibly the most common experience of people starting new Gopher holes. Compared to just saving a personal journal to file or keeping one's thought to one's self, the indisputable extra effort of publishing content in a Gopher hole, suspecting it to be read by nearly nobody, is pretty hard to justify. At the end of the day Gopher is a communication protocol. You use it because you want to communicate publicly, and therefore people expect it to be accessed by more than an handful of others. The idea of a blog-like section in a gopher hole is something that NP89 has themself picked up from the Gopher community. One person starts, which inspires another person to start, which rewards the first person with more content to read themselves. The phlogs, or glogs as NP89 seems to prefer to call them, are a shining success story of community engagement on Gopher. On the other hand I've got sections like History Snippets which I started in my Gopher hole where I would have loved to inspire other like-minded people to do something similar. As it is, lack of suggestion that anyone but me is interested has certainly been the main reason why I did away with my attempt at regular additions there. I'd certainly be interested to read other people's assessments of political micro-parties, even in other countries, but there's no sign that my section on pre-election Australian political party research/opinions has had any interest either. My offer to accept comments there via email was never taken up. I wasn't expecting a response to those sections as such, but had they received one I would have considered it a success for Gopher. It would prove that Gopher's appeal as a communication system is still wide enough to be used by people with special interests besides computers. My phlog is quite possibly the most active part of my Gopher hole because it is sort-of transactional. Even though people rarely ever respond directly to my phlog posts, there is an idea that if I'm reading their phlog they might be reading mine, and maybe that inspires them to write too. If I were certain that 99% of the people posting to Gopherspace really don't care whether I post or not, maybe I would be less inclined to participate. Much like how I haven't been adding pages as regularly at my website, where the logs showed how little interest there was for content that I thought was akin to other people's webpages which I enjoyed reading myself. So maybe Cardboard64 was expecting more from Gopher than it was likely to provide, but I don't think they missed the point entirely. This isn't something akin to a private mailing list where we know and control the exact breadth of the audience we talk to. We speak to the world and hope it might speak back in a similar voice. Knowing that it isn't really listening seems like an easy reason why someone might give up. In my case I choose not to know. Not only did I conclude early on that I don't care about the server logs for my Gopher hole being inaccessible (although they certainly could be made available with a little work by the admin to set up filters), but after I switched to hosting my websites on a VPS instead of shared hosting I never set up a web log analyser there. So I'm not tracking page views on my website anymore either. I might be giving back content to like-minded individuals, or I might be throwing all my effort away. For fear of going the same way as Cardboard64, I prefer not to be certain either way. - The Free Thinker