Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?
Honest question, if you like it I'm not trying to put you down, but I just don't see how it's any better or worse than HTTP
Honest question, if you like it I'm not trying to put you down, but I just don't see how it's any better or worse than HTTP
This drive is expressed in many different ways both in the frontend and backend. In a way, static site generators were a reaction to complex CMS systems. Another expression is people going back to retro design using only basic features provided by HTML / CSS with minimal (audio)visual cues. Or even just publishing text.
Then there's people who feel that even HTTP and HTML are bloated themselves, and move away wholesale from the Web towards a parallel world which has been coined by some as "smolweb" or "dorkweb"
see: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...
A major catalyst is the Gemini protocol which emerged a few short years ago and gained some popularity. In the wake of that, people re-discovered the Gopher protocol as well.
I think these communities are niches driven by similar motivations as, say, aficionados of BBS systems or ham radio. That is, the aspect of tinkering, being in control and not being hampered by complexity and inherent restrictions. Plus the ability to create an independent community of like-minded souls. And, sure enough, a sense of nostalgia as well.
One could note the quaintness associated with this resurgence, but it's tied into a philosophical debate regarding online freedom and privacy as well. Unlike the Web, these protocols lack all kinds of affordances making it far harder (but not impossible) to track people across the Gopherverse or the Gemini space.
I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the appification of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web.
I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the commercialization of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web
A gopher URL looks like: gopher://host/Xfile
Where X isn't part of the path name, it's one-character file type code. This code is client-side only and determine how the client downloads and interprets the file. Gopher has 2 separate ways of sending files - Binary files are sent as-is. Text/Menu files are sent line-oriented, with a CRLF after each line and a trailing . CR LF at the end. Again, the type code is on the client side and is not sent to the server.
It brings to mind a box where I used to work, full of forgotten hardware that never really caught on. It was fun to check it out in some ways, but when discussing the pain points there was usually an audible groan from someone nearby.
It sounds like you have some interesting stories to tell. Can you give an example of something that sticks out in your memory?
The one advantage to this approach is that you can always convince a client to show you the source of gopher://host/1index by requesting gopher://host/0index.
It's a lot like how some people read books sometimes even though movies are available.
It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.
100%. The craptastic-ness of the modern JS web is driving a broader resurgence in things you might call "indie web" or "retro web". In addition to gopher, the Gemini protocol seems to be gaining traction and has a fairly active community.
I wonder what the web would have looked like if the web had been more like Hypercard. I think back to high school, with some students delivering their history projects as multimedia hypercard stacks on floppy disk. Weird times those were. And for as weird and unique as Geocities websites were, they all fit the page model.
The web feels like it's never been fully unconstrained in the way that something like Hypercard or Squeak were. We moved a lot of the analog world to the digital world in a hurry. At the start of it all, there was intense skepticism about the digital replacements for analog things because the digital thing more often than not sucked by comparison. I think Hypercard is evidence of a time when computer companies felt they were competing with a richer set of analog alternatives.