Why Gopher in 2026?

Gopher or not.. there are BBSes, there are many ways just to stop doom scrolling, avoid surveillance economy as much as possible and live offline with a book (not a kindle device) on your knees. and yes.. most of the ADHD generation with depressions, self-identification problems that we see today is exactly because tech made them this way.. or social media most of all. I came back to simpler life some years ago. Being close to 50yo punk rocker who every time when asked to reply on Whatsapp answers "I don't have Whatsapp, if you want to call me you should afford to call me without making Zuck richer at your own cost". and people.. are.. bamboozled in most cases and just carry on doom scrolling themselves. I don't. I finally have time again for movies, books, games and deeper communication with fewer and just occasionally pop up in more... I hope, moderated places like even here (although Hacker News that mixes tech, politics and food links is not exactly Hacker to me anymore and that's where actually some harder moderation would be beneficial here instead of just letting cry outs down voting just because we may have different opinions). World is screwed as this guy described in his phlog. Hard to believe river can be turned back with a stick as we say in my country... but skipping as much BS as possible and "don't feed the troll" should be rephrased as don't support social media barons and political adversaries who manipulate us via non-moderated pseudo journalism.. not just punishing simple people who just want simple lives. I personally miss times when netiquette (the one that emerged from early UNIX and USENET communities) was still the thing in the net. At full extend.

I still think Gopher (the protocol that is) is still very relevant today. The beauty of it really is in its simplicity. Great to see that the library I wrote all those years ago is still being used :D https://pkg.go.dev/git.mills.io/prologic/go-gopher

I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.

This got me thinking that I already have all my posts in my ATproto PDS anyway, so why not to serve them as a Gopher hole too? Here we go, my Gohper server baked by ATproto : - https://forge.l3x.in/alex/crystalgoph - gopher://gopher.l3x.in Very much alpha quality, but it's already working relatively well with e.g. lynx

For anyone who may not be familiar with it, SDF is actually pretty amazing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System Among many, many other services, you can get your own Gopher or Gemini site there. I really like the Lagrange browser, which works with both Gopher and Gemini: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ Another excellent Gopher resource that hasn’t been mentioned here yet: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw Gopher is still quite active, and there’s lots to read. Gemini, from what I’ve seen, is less so. A lot of what I’ve seen is just cross-posted between Gopher/Gemini or even Gopher/Gemini/WWW, so there’s not much point to it. You’ll also see a lot of “I’ve just discovered Gemini! Here’s why I think it’s awesome.” And then, they never post again. There's a good amount of that on Gopher as well, but you'll also find lots of Gopherholes that have been active for years. Still, though, I think Gemini has a lot of potential. It’s a much more pleasant browsing experience than today’s web, but it’s had trouble finding a niche so far. There’s one group of people who think that it doesn’t really solve any problems not already solved by Gopher, and there’s another group that just cross-posts all of their content to the web to maximize its potential audience, which kind of defeats the point.