## State Of Gopher State Of Gopher by Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net> ## Welcome to the land of Opportunity! Gopherspace is small, no gold seekers are interested in it. The free realm of intellectual prosperty is what you find here. Even if it is just a small project, you can just do it and noone hinders you. On the other side the web takes your freedom, it is overregulated, people will sue you for being too creative. Who wants that? ## Welcome to the land of Adventures! Come in lonely wanderer. No special skill is required to be a gopherhole owner or just a gopherspace citizen. Just #bee-yourself, fly around, have fun, do what you like. Thinks work as espected, do not spy on you, do not hate you, like web browsers. If you want to leave, you can leave. No data will be left behind, in case you change your mind. Nothing will hinder your future. It is up to you to join in, help others, find the treasure of your life. ## Welcome to the land of Comradeship! Without personal interest and just the good of the gopherspace in mind, mostly you will find comrades, people who tell you the truth but are helpful and do not want bad from you. Join a community you like, with a mindset that fits to you, depending on your interests or if you want to find new interests. Or found your own community. Come on in and feel a better life! ## Gopher Stats > [ 398 hosts - 96074 selectors - 11076 images - 472 audio - 3261 videos ] ( gopher://gopher.icu/1/quarry ) Gopher lawn entries has increased by 11 to 178 entries. * Long TODO list to be added. ## Gopher Stats More non-bitreich services have gone online: * Quarry, a new search * gopher://gopher.icu/1/quarry * Gutenberg frontend * gopher://gopher.icu/1/gutenberg ## Gopher Stats Services online and useful every day: * Gopherpedia * gopher://gopherpedia.com * Youtube search frontend Idiotbox * gopher://codemadness.og/1/idiotbox.cgi * The Lawn Index * gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn * Veronica II search * gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2 ## Gopher Activity * The mailinglist is sadly mostly dead. * The cancellation has hurt it much. * Average activity was mostly me sending e-mails not everyon found funny. ## Gopher Activity * At least three IRC channels with various types of community. * #gopherproject on Libera.chat * most active channel * old #gopherproject on Freenode still there but inactive * #gopher on SDF * inactive, as it seems * #gopher on Tilde * inactive ## Gopher Activity * The Phlogosphere is growing even more and very active. gopher://gopher.black/1/moku-pona ## Gopher Protocol Changes * the simple TLS proposal, to check for the first byte has a wide support now * parazyd will talk about this after my talk. * Hopefully the endless discussions are over now and we can move on to more productive things. * In working on the gopher quarry, a sitemap proposal for the robots.txt has been worked out. ## Gopher Quarry IanJ works on his gopher quarry, a simple search for gopher. See: git://gopher.icu/quarry There is already a crawler/indexer, a search frontend, a sitemap generator. It is like eomyidae (git://bitreich.org/eomyidae), but more advanced and usable at the moment. Eomyidae is stalled due to the pandemic. Hopefully those initiatives will spark some more interest in getting more features in search for gopher. The goals are cited in previous conferences. Searches should not compete, they should work together, so new ideas can be easily integrated. No big resources shuld be required for a genius idea to be usable for all gopher users. All input welcome! ## Gopher Sitemaps Based on the lawn db entries: Type: 1 Selector: /contact.dcgi Host: gopher.icu Port: 70 LinkName: Contact Description: My contact details Categories: Keywords: -------- Type: 1 Selector: /gutenberg Host: gopher.icu Port: 70 LinkName: Gutenberg (unofficial book and audio search interface) Description: Gopher search interface to the official Gutenberg book repository Categories: Books Keywords: Books ------- ## Gopher Sitemap Generator See gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Quarry.md for more details. > The reasons for the sitemap are twofold: > 1. Efficiency, downloading a single index file rather than crawling. > 2. The format supports additional metadata: > * Description > * Categories > * Keywords Allow more freedom for site owners, in contrary to what Google does. ## Gopher Sitemaps in Robots.txt The robots.txt has been approved two years ago. Gopherhole owners should allow sitemaps to be downloaded instead of the crawler wasting precious resources on small-resource machines. This is being worked on. My proposal: cat robots.txt Sitemap: /sitemap.zip sitemap.zip includes sitemap files, allowed selectors, further known servers, to help crawlers. ## Tildeverse * tildeverse.org | we're a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. if you're | interested in learning about *nix (linux, unix, bsd, etc) come check out our | member tildes and sign up! % printf "/\r\n" | nc tildeverse.org 70 | grep "^h" \ | grep website | sort | uniq | wc -l 27 Minus three from last year, but stable. ## Bitreich Services See the State of Bitreich Talk. * Ideas Project * Bithub for intellectual porn * Bitreich TV * See talk on Saturday * Meme service * The Lawn * Friendless Network * Snowmen Project * Onion Initiative ## Bitreich Services * Meme University * Dance Academy * XML Strip Club * Tutorials Project * VLA movement * Penis Extension Service * Bitreich OneLine for free gopherspace trial codes * Kiosk * ... Extending more, based on daily input. ## Gopher Lawn The Lawn has been been reworked internally and now uses a new db format. It is like the sitemaps format. This will enable crawler and indexer results to be reused in the lawn, with manual maintenance. Type: link Selector: / Host: ygrex.ru Port: 70 LinkName: ygrex.ru Description: ygrex.ru - __ Nothing _@_ All __ Category: homepage, russian, software, book Keywords: homepage, russian Description: Some long description Sitemaps just have a separator line of at least three times minus ("-") for storing many in one file. ## Gopher Lawn * Categories are now automatically generated. * Sub categories are in the work, but make the model very much complex. * Changes are posted to #gopher-lawn * New proposals are posted to #gopher-lawn All maintainers are welcome, it is very easy. git://bitreich.org/gopher-lawn ## Gopher Tutorials gopher://bitreich.org/1/tutorials It was referenced as good introduction to gopher! https://gopher.zone/tutorial-for-absolute-beginners/ This should motivate us more into writing some more tutorials. ## Sidenotes: Gemini As a mix out of gopher simplicity and more expressiveness, a new protocol was created: Gemini. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ > Is heavier than gopher > Is lighter than the web > Will not replace either > Strives for maximum power to weight ratio > Takes user privacy very seriously ## Sidenotes: Gemini Watching Gemini is good to see what can be done to a protocols and eventually use this for gopher. Like for TLS certificates: ( https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi ) > Clients can validate TLS connections however they like (including not > at all) but the strongly RECOMMENDED approach is to implement a > lightweight "TOFU" certificate-pinning system which treats self-signed > certificates as first- class citizens. This greatly reduces TLS overhead > on the network (only one cert needs to be sent, not a whole chain) and > lowers the barrier to entry for setting up a Gemini site (no need to pay > a CA or setup a Let's Encrypt cron job, just make a cert and go). > TOFU stands for "Trust On First Use" and is public-key security model > similar to that used by OpenSSH. ## Sidenotes: Gemini * Mime types and error codes have gone too far in gemini. * All protocols have their reason for existence. ## Gopher Future * Use it for every day life. * Keep the gopher history alive. * Keep the fun of using it. * Keep the feeling of using something lean and fast. * Get gopher support everywhere. * If you are maintaining something, adding support is easily done. * Write more gopher frontends for the web. ## Gopher Usage Summary Always try to make your ideas come true on gopherspace. * Keep the infrastructure simple to grasp, simple to extend. * IanJ put his chickens cam online. ## Questions, Ideas Have you liked the last year on gopher? #pause How much are you using gopher / web ratio per day? #pause How much CO2 have you saved last year by using gopher instead of other technologies? #pause ## Thanks Thank you for listening! If you have further comments, contact me at Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>