Introduction
============

I just arrived in the Republic. This  is my first phlog here. This is
also my first  writing in english for  a blog or a phlog.  I am sorry
for all the future mistakes I will certainly do.

As  everyone  here,  I  prefer  minimalism  than  big  and  bloat.  I
discovered Gopher  only a  few months  ago. In the  1990s, I  think I
never used it.  Perhaps because I was living at  five kilometers from
the CERN in Geneva… which is quite far away from Minnesota.

I like  it for simplicity,  for dealing with  plain text and  for the
focus it  brings on reading,  through uniformity of  presentation and
lack of images. I feel for a long time that surfing on the web is not
really reading.  It is often like  watching a movie with  the forward
acceleration and just playing some parts of it. I like serendipity in
the web surfing, but I think it is important to keep other techniques
to get information  through internet in a more  hierarchical and less
rhizomatic way. Surfing  is like gaming: it is very  pleasant, but it
is more time consuming than really efficient in any serious purpose.

I  have a  self-hosted website  in  french with  pelican static  blog
engine. I recently copied the material to a self-hosted gopherhole.

During the first  weeks I was exploring Gopher, I  just used Veronica
search engine  to find Gopherholes and  the whole thing seemed  to me
fragmented, abandoned and  quite empty. Then I  discovered the Pubnix
communities like SDF or Circumlunar  and realized that this world was
on the contrary quite active and living.  That is why I joined one of
them.

I will  keep my  french phlogs  on my self-hosted  server and  try to
write some words in english here from time to time.