I can haz smol internet!
========================

It is with  delight that I announce the launch  of my first
ever pholg! \o/

Even  though  I  had  heard  about  Gopher  and  even  seen
a  small  number  of  Gopherspaces via  proxies,  it  never
occured  to me  to dive  in and  take a  closer look  at it
until I  attended this year's bitreich  conference online :
gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022

This  was  my  first   encounter  with  bitreich  too.  All
of  it  happened thanks  to  jrmu  who did  a  presentation
at  the   conference  about  IRCNow:  The   Users'  Network
:  https://ircnow.org  .  At   first,  even  attending  the
conference itself  felt intimidating,  because most  of the
information was  presented via a Gopherspace.  The software
setup they used to host the  event was very unique. It took
some effort at first to be  able to navigate the pages, and
figure out what  should be done, where to  connect etc. The
second day of the conference  was - almost - entirely about
Gopher. Those  sessions made a  great deal of sense  to me.
That is  when I  realized that  I already  had access  to a
place (SDF!) where I could  learn further by actually doing
it.

So the primary goal of  this Gopherspace in the near future
would  be to  function as  a place  for me  to explore  the
Gopher protocol  and learn  more about it.  In doing  so, I
will try to  write about whatever that interests  me at the
time of writing.

I am not a tech savvy person  like most of the users on SDF
or in the  Gophersphere in general. I did not  grow up with
computers or fall  in love with computing at  some stage in
my  life. I  learned to  deal with  computers because  they
crashed into our lives and there  was no way to escape. All
of a sudden it became a thing to follow a "computer course"
in order to acquire a set of skills that  was considered to
be so vital in making  oneself employable. There is nothing
romantic or interesting about  that. It can get interesting
when we  regain control over  our lives by learning  how to
coexist better with computers.

I  really like  the simplicity  of Gopher.  This looks  and
feels very  similar to the way  I wanted to publish  on the
web: write what you want to publish, simply upload and keep
things  organized by  linking to  it from  a central  place
(or  a 'home  page'). I  don't  know, this  analogy may  be
technically incomplete in explaining  how Gopher works. But
that is primarily why I liked it at first.

- LohanG | lohang@sdf.org