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Tara Vancil on exploring how to be online in radical ways (2018)

elliott.computer

43 pointscookingoils10 comments

Over the weekend I fell into a wiki-hole about the Gopher protocol [0]. I’d heard of it as a sort of weird predecessor to the Web as we know it, but what I didn’t realise is that it’s still fairly active. There’s a network of community maintained servers keeping the non-commercial spirit of the early Internet alive [1].

It’s also easy to set up and run a gopher server. It took about 30 mins to get going on my raspberry pi, including setting up dynamic dns and port forwarding for remote access.

As gopher sites are just a collection of plain text files, they’re fast, clean and minimal.

As well as new cool stuff like above, rediscovering and repurposing older tech could be another way of diversifying the monoculture of the current Web.

Was thinking today how cool a combined Gopher browser/server/editor app could be. It wouldn’t look much different to the one above...

Oh yeah, it’s also possible to browse HN from Gopher. [2]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

[1] https://sdf.org/

[2] gopher://hngopher.com/

using HTML rather than plain text was the real win. HTTP vs Gopher wasn't anything anyone cared about compared to the ease of use of Hypertext links.

And then came inline images, and it was all over.

I'm all for plain HTML, no CSS, no JS, but going back to plain text is a big step backwards.

I actually prefer plain text, which is why I like HN.

Images make it too easy to shut down interesting discussions with crapflooding; just look at any typical imageboard for an example. Images also make it easier for people to attack site hosts by posting illegal content, which is important to prevent if you are hosting controversial discussions.

Ah yes - the good old days when you could finger people that you didn't know:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

Ever since I first heard of Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com/) I fell in love with their idea and concept. They've made making web apps/sites really fun and easy. They are on Open Collective if you'd like to help (I'm not associated with them in any way): https://opencollective.com/beaker

I'm always super excited to hear about Beaker, but I just don't feel safe browsing the web without extension support for the privacy tools I use.

I know that Mozilla is looking at getting low-level DAT support in Firefox so this kind of stuff could be handled through extensions instead, anyone know what the status of that is?

There's a Firefox DAT add-on

Unfortunately you need to run a DAT gateway on your local machine for the add-on to work.

Supposedly Brave wants to add it: https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/949kac/when_...

Seems to me that with a new protocol one could also offer an alternate domain name system as well, and presumably it would be free. You’d want each browser to offer a little time slice to domain name resolution, but you’d also have people like me who would be willing to pay for nodes on the network that did nothing but peering.

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