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a little post about my journey through Geminispace and my feelings on what it means for the Internet as a whole. the most beautiful and smart 'net surfers already know about this post due to them subscribing to my RSS feed
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in reply to @nicky's post:
Woah this is extremely my kind of thing. I had installed Deedum before I finished reading your post. About a decade ago I had the thought “I bet there’s still a weird niche of Gopher users online” and was deeply disappointed to discover: no. This scratches that itch perfectly.
You’d think this kind of thing would be full of dry technical people talking about dry technical things about protocols and networking and nothing else…but it has attracted all kinds of people posting all kinds of things.
This is such strong Early Internet energy (by which I mean circa 1995). A bunch of nerds, yeah (hi!), but also a bunch of clever creative people recognizing that, hey, here is a new way to share things and connect with people. And that’s what gopher was, and what IRC was, and what listservs were, and what the web was, and that’s what cohost is, and that’s what the internet always has been and always will be. It’s not the technology and it’s not the money. It’s the people, doing people things.
Thanks for the blog post!
hell yeah!! the people are what makes technology work and thrive!! glad to introduce you to this
About a decade ago I had the thought “I bet there’s still a weird niche of Gopher users online” and was deeply disappointed to discover: no.
there are some people, me included, running gopher servers that serve actual traffic today still. the turnover with servers seem to be rather high, however
Yes, I’ve learned that while investigating Gemini! When I last looked — probably closer to 15 years ago than 10 — all the evidence I could find was that Gopher was dead dead dead. The only server software seemed to be the original UMN server but everyone said you shouldn’t run it because it had known unpatched security holes. I was glad to discover that the protocol is still around; Gopher was a definite part of my very early internet experience, though I think even then (~1995) it was on the decline.
yeah. I ended up writing my own server software, though there are ones in python and perl that are fairly popular from what I understand. I'd honestly presume cameron kaiser's had an appreciable impact with gopher.floodgap.com in new people discovering it
thank you for posting this it makes me super happy :)
def have thought about getting into this but im trying to spend LESS time on the computer, lol...
i rly like your point about how spaces like this show we'll still want to connect with each other on the internet even if the corporate structure falls out beneath us-- so many corpos have convinced ppl that all this shit is 'necessary' for the internet to exist, which is a rly obvious lie when u see stuff like this