Re: Gopher Archives (zaibatsu), 10/30/2019
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Multiple people have responded[1..4] to solderpunk's 
great post about archiving gopher content[5]. Here are a few 
additional thoughts, and a brief experience or two:

- I'm partial to the idea that this earth is entirely 
  impermanent in every possible way. My teen years in Oregon 
  cemented the notion, as I watched simple blackberries 
  climb up and tear down old farm buildings, and even a 
  steel silo, on our property. Nothing lasts forever, why 
  should gopher content?

- Archive.org is awesome, and I use it all the time. Being a 
  retro computing hobbyist, I frequently find links that no 
  longer work; and frequently, archive.org brings them back 
  for one more hoorah. 

  Even so, I haven't always played nicely with archive.org. 
  Once, I wanted a few things to be forgotten, for various 
  personal reasons. I took my sites down, then contacted 
  archive.org to have my content scrubbed (I should have 
  done that in the reverse order, to make proving ownership 
  easier). The process wasn't painless, but it was fairly 
  effective. I appreciate that they were willing to work 
  with me on my wishes for my content.

- The "individual archivist" is an awesome idea. If you like 
  it, and want to keep it, then keep it. Gopher supports 
  this rather well, and the kind of client that solderpunk 
  describes would be simple enough. An exceptional solution; 
  the only question would arise when someone wanted to share 
  their archive.

As for my content, like conman[4], everything I put "online" 
in any form, I consider public. Not that it's not mine, but 
that everyone can see it, save it, share it, comment on it, 
abuse it, hit me over the head with it- not that they should 
do any of these things, but that they can do them if they 
choose to.

One last rant, on gopher->http proxies: I can't stand these, 
because of the rate at which Google picks them up. I realize 
they're a potential gateway for new readers/users on gopher, 
but I just can't stand them. And yet, there's really not a 
whole lot that I am willing and able to do about it. Life 
goes on, and I don't lose any sleep over it. Gopher is still 
awesome.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gallowsgryph/phlog/2019-10-29_archives.txt
[2] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/sysdharma/phlog/./2019.10.28
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eyargo/clog/xu-gopher-archive-civil-rights.txt
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org:70/0Phlog:2019/10/29.2
[5] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-individual-archivist-and-ghosts-of-gophers-past.txt