Gopher and Web ============== I read a bbs message from sloum who made a few days ago a comparison which I found quite bright. He compared the gopherspace to a quiet life in countryside where the Web would be a hectic life in a big city. That's clearly part of what I feel attractive with Gopher. In the web, you have to manage the rush: a lot of things are happening every minute and you just cannot follow the tempo. You always think you missed something and it is true. The new articles from a week ago can be difficult to find on a website which is often configured to push new items in the showcase and to hide older ones. For other things than blogs, you will probably need to use a search engine and to look quite carefully in the results. With Gopher, things a more stable and slow, but they stay here, because it is more static and less dynamic. No one tries to sell you new items, so the timeline is just a stable structure that can be integrated to the phlog and helps you to find the information. Inside a pubnix community, you have the benefits of a little village without the disadvantages: pseudos can preserve your anonymity if you need it, but the community size is small enough to preserve from the impersonal relationships in big towns. In a way, you know your virtual neighbors and can speak with them easily. On a Mastodon web instance, for example, the situation is quite different. You don't share a lot more with all the many users of the instance than the main public tool to communicate. You cannot build or modify the common tools with them, for example. You are the clients of the server, not the users. The sharing is just about communications, not about building things together. In this pubnix, I was very pleased to find a lot of tools and advices to use them, which are created and shared by users. People don't just talk. They try to improve their virtual world.