The most unique parts of the Gophernet are gophermaps. They're the
most customizable part that allows a person to express their
individual style. They're the index.html of Gopher. Yet I choose not
to use them as a main page.

Why? Because the idea of Gopher to me is separating navigation from
content. Aside from using gophermaps as a "favorites" list and a way
to link to external gophers, they don't really fit with the Gopher
ideology. There have been lots of ingenious implementations of them as
a glog/phlog medium with easier citation access, and those are cool.
They're also useful as obfuscating folders and files you don't want
public visitors to read.

I still use gophermaps as they are essential to link to other gophers,
but I like to keep my root directory clean to remind myself of the
beauty and idea of Gopher of separating navigation from content.

Gopher as a protocol COULD work almost exactly the same as the WWW. It
can serve HTML, JS, and CSS files. The only difference would be using
gopher:// and gophermaps instead of index files. But I feel like that
would be a disservice to the speed, simplicity, and vision of Gopher.

UPDATE: Filename changed as issues of putting "gophermap" in a
filename seems to cause issues by dumping the text into the directory.