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 18-08-2018

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I stumbled into gopherspace less than a fortnight ago, without any 
prior knowledge of the gopher protocol, or phlogs, or any of these 
networks. First-up: thanks to all the people who are part of this 
place. I've really appreciated surfing through really interesting 
thoughts and worlds, and stuff being shared. There's something about 
plaintext, together with this gopherspace framework and context, that 
I can't quite put my finger on - but it seems to make a lot of sense. 
Or seems preferable or advantageous to me, in many ways, when set 
against the social network* (*I use this term broadly encompassing the 
big key players, mainly Facebook & Twitter, at the time of writing).

I climbed down the gopherhole on a lazy Thursday afternoon off-work, 
when the local heatwave finally broke and a refreshing storm and rain 
broke overhead, and I had nothing too heavy on my To Do list but a 
freshly brewed pot of coffee, a few little bits of personal admin and 
the whole day ahead of me at home. Funnily enough, after months of 
back-of-the-mind plotting, I decided on that day to go ahead and try 
and hack back a bit at my digital footprint (this winding back off 
online systems and services has been an ongoing thing with me over the 
past couple of years). I gathered my data and deleted a whole bunch of 
online accounts and was right in the middle of re-organising my 
digital life when I came across a little introduction to gopher.

I appreciate how working with gopher brings things back to basics; I 
think there's loads of potential here, both in gopher but also in some 
of the seeds of thought here around information media design, 
protocols, communication, etc. I've found a lot of musings around 
these issues in some of the writing I've encountered so far, which has 
made me feel some kind-of affinity with this place. But also I just 
simply appreciate the plaintext, storytelling & journaling. Hopefully 
I'll add to this place in a way that others will find of interest too.