Timing is everything, or so the cliche goes.

I was thinking about the rise and fall of Gopher while the younger
HTTP/WWW took control and how Gopher became comparably deserted. UMN
got greedy and tried to charge licensing fees. The WWW did not. And
because of that, a decidedly less-organized Internet paradigm was
launched into dominance. UMN later removed the fee, but the damage was
done.

Gopher had a head start on the WWW. It didn't end up mattering because
commercial interests on one of the least-commercialized products sank
Gopher's popularity to the depths. It's just amazing. I was a small
child when this all happened, but I'm still glad it happened this way.
As much as I'd love to see Gopher get more popular, it's almost like a
little secret, a clubhouse of sorts. It's like Vivaldi or Opera in
that way: a browser that may not be the flashiest or most popular, but
they bring something very unique to the table, although Vivaldi and
Opera are/were known for having more features and flexibility, not
less like Gopher vs. the WWW (albeit much of the WWW's features that
make it an online heavyweight (pun intended) are because of the Web's
burst of popularity).

Tangentially, I've decided I'm against Gopher proxies. Yes, there is
marginally more exposure for Gopher to newbies, but I really don't
like seeing stuff that is uniquely on Gopherspace automatically
indexed by big G or other search engines crawling Gopherspace. I write
stuff to be on here, not on the Web. I supposed I could do some
htaccess file to remove crawlers, but I'll have to look into it and
I'm not positive it would work with proxies.