Why Gopher?
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`w " -nathaN
I feel enthusiastic about the community of tilde and smol Internet
users, not about the specific protocols and software involved. I'm
all for building a community of creative people (artists, hackers,
musicians, writers, and so forth).
Some basic gopher clients are lynx, gopherus, and curl.
lynx
gopherus
curl
The charm of the gopher protocol is its technical simplicity. For
technical details, see this link:
Below are notes in chronological order.
2018-01-22 - Jessamyn West on Gopher
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Gopher is the information without the flair, the HTML without the
Javascript. Gopher gives me what I want when what I want is to read
stuff, not like/comment/interact/favorite/share etc. I'm a big fan
of all of those things, but sometimes I just want to read a thing on
an old computer and follow a few links. Gopher lets me do that.
It's ultimate Old Web and I am one of those ultimate Old Web ladies
who still uses Lynx occasionally... --Jessamyn C. West
2019-12-04 - Plain Text Project
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So why does plain text matter? It's a ubiquitous, almost universal
format. You can easily create plain text documents on any operating
system and on any device. You don't need a specialized tool to do it,
either. Plain text is also very long lasting.
2020-09-06 - The Internet Is For End Users
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When there is a conflict between the interests of end users of the
Internet and other parties... [you] should favor end users.
2022-03-11 - The Authentic Web
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Brereton told me recently that his frustration began in late 2020.
I was browsing the Internet one day, and I began to feel like
something was just off," he said. "A lot of the content doesn't feel
authentic--it doesn't feel real." He sounded bemused by the runaway
popularity of his post, which was part of a personal research project
on how information is organized online. Better information could be
found on social media, discussion boards, and small-scale personal
blogs, but Google Search was deprioritizing those platforms in favor
of corporate Web sites, which could afford the money and effort it
takes to optimize for Google's search algorithm. "The authentic Web"
seemed hidden, Brereton said. "The algorithms tell us what to read."
From: What Google Search Isn't Showing You
2022-07-14 - The Future of the Internet
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This model is likely the future of computing and networking, and it
is no minor tweak. It's a wholesale revision to the Internet and PC
environment we've experienced for the past thirty years. The
serendipity of outside tinkering that has marked that generative era
gave us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype,
Wikipedia--all ideas out of left field. Now it is disappearing,
leaving a handful of new gatekeepers in place, with us and them
prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear
things that are new and disruptive.
From: The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
2022-07-21 - Algospeak
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Algorithms are causing human language to reroute around them in
real time. I'm listening to this youtuber say things like "the bad
guy unalived his minions" because words like "kill" are associated
with demonetization.
2022-07-30 - We don't need to rebuild the Internet
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They also like to bemoan the things we've supposedly lost:
communities (forums), old technologies (IRC, gopher, newsgroups,
RSS), and things like that. Things from the so-called 'old web'.
The things is, though, a lot of those things still exist, still run
by hobbyists (yours truly included). You just have to have an
interest in something beyond your social media network's walled
garden and know how to get out there once in a while. Those are two
things that we nearly *have* lost, and it's really disappointing to
me.
[In other words this author says we need to rebuild a sense of
curiosity and teach each other how to step outside the walled
gardens.]
2022-10-28 - Human scale technology
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Small technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with
communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from
the commercial Internet.
The smallnet crowd is DIY-minded, they self-host community-run
servers and community-built services, often using limited CPU,
memory, disk space and bandwidth by choice, using simple protocols,
formats and tools.
2023-09-30 - Dead Internet theory
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The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts
that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and
automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic
curation, marginalizing organic human activity.
2024-04-14 - TLS Apocalypse
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Enthusiasts on internet maintain a Crypto Ancienne library, which
can be used by old computers to natively connect to services
encrypted with modern crypto algorithms. Their README states that a
Motorola 68030 CPU at 25MHz requires 22 seconds of prime number
computations to connect to a server, and most servers hang up the
connection during that time.
... I think the resurgence of the Gopher protocol means that Gopher
is likely the best place for old computers to live, since it's a
trivial protocol to implement, there's clients for even very limited
systems like the Commodore 64(!), and lots of people in the
retrocomputing hobby are rediscovering it...