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/