Surfing the Gopherspace

Check out Lagrange, it's actually a browser for Geminispace but works perfectly well for gopher: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

Thanks for giving my Gopher client a shout-out! :)

Share a link! I’d love to check it out.

gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/

This gopher hole is a good example of how Gopher doesn't have an notion of cookies. You can see what is either gamestate or some sort of session id encoded in the URL.

Another way to do this kind of thing is to generate "parallel universes". It involves generating enough gopher "directories" AKA "pages" to encode every possible game state and then link them together like you would a "Choose Your Own Adventure". Essentially trading dynamic page generation for hard drive space.

You can see an example of the "parallel universes" approach used in the easter egg text adventure game located at:

gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck

Definitely going to try this next!

I think that as people get older there's an increasing desire for things to be simple again. This will never happen of course, but it can be useful to have a small island of simplicity to go back to every so often.

Personally speaking .. with a perceived growing trend towards using low(er) power hardware - planning for dystopian power shortages etc - I know that I can host a reasonable server on a Raspberry Pi and still have it working effectively. I had mine running on a Pi2B for quite a while, but with the introduction of the Pi Zero 2 and the addition of an ethernet HAT, that's also a viable device. The size of the gopher files library will be determined by the USB stick you can afford.

Browsing text files online without needing a browser that eats up gigabytes of memory for javascript sandboxing.

Besides Gopher we had WAIS, Archie, and Veronica. There were also sites with multiple directories of text and binary files via (often anonymous) FTP. BBS systems with text clients or even reachable over Telnet or SSH were once popular and some are still available. We also had talkers (and MUDs, and MOOs, and MUSHes) where one could connect to a text-based environment to play games, chat, build the environment collaboratively with others, or some mix of those.

I remember back before my area had a local phone number for any direct Internet access, there were a few choices. One could get SLIP or PPP by calling long distance. There were per-minute toll-free access numbers. One could use a local echo on a dial-up BBS and wait several hours to a few days for the content. We thankfully had a public library in one of the bigger cities that had a web browser (Lynx) set up as a shell on a VMS system via a getty on a toll-free line. Several of us would rent a shell account somewhere, dial into the library, and use the browser to telnet to our shell accounts. Then we could use a text-based web browser, gopher client, WAIS client, Archie/Veronica client, FTP, or whatever from there. If we wanted to download a file back to our desktops, we'd download it to the shell account then use Kermit or Zmodem through the telnet connection back to our local systems.

There's also Gemini, which is like a modern version of Gopher.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi