Getting to know Gopher

I remember my roommate mentioning Gopher when we were both in
university. The way he explained it wasn't the best, but he seemed to
have a genuine fascination for the thing. Since his research was
mostly in ontologies and the joining together of complex datasets, his
enthusiasm for Gopher mostly seemed to stem from the clarity and
effectiveness of its content mapping.

I'll be honest and say I never saw the point. At that point I was
still pretty sold on the web and what it had to offer. But then came
2019 and the excitement around Gemini. I was swept up too, at the
time. It seemed like such an interesting protocol and offered such a
simple way of creating and linking content. I lost interest fairly
quickly as I was still quite focused on the WWW, but a couple of years
later I remembered Gemini. I posted something on Mastodon about how
Gemini was another fad that people just kind of fell away from after a
few days. Someone informed me that Gemini was going from strength to
strength. I decided to check it back out, and now it's pretty much my
go-to place to post things.

But Gopher never really appealed in the same way. I don't really know
why. The Gopher community seems to be a lot quieter and less
interested in marketing what's here. There's a kind of peace in Gopher
that forms a nice yang to Gemini's excitement ying.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around Gopher's link syntax a bit. I
can see the point in it: it forces you to actually communicate what a
linked resource is and where it is. That's pretty cool, but it's also
pretty cumbersome to write.

Apart from that, it all seems simpler even than Gemini. I can't find
much in the way of markup documentation, which leads me to think
there's no formatting at all outside of gopher links. That's fine.
Formatting often just gets in the way of writing because you worry too
much about conveying meaning visually rather than textually.

But yeah, that's my only thoughts at the moment. Not sure if I'll keep
up a phlog alongside my gemlog, but maybe.

--
~sporiff

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