gopher

I've been building up my gopherhole for a while now, and I hope to have it online soon, so why not have a gopher thread? >what is gopher gopher is a protocol for the distribution of files over the internet. it is in many ways similar to http, but it is far simpler. for more, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29 and http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/gopher/welcome >to start the discussion Do you think gopher still has a place on the modern internet? Do you have a gopherhole? What is your favorite client/server? Any favorite gopherholes you want to share? >some recommended links gopher://sdf.org/ - the sdf gopherhole gopher://kamalatta.ddnss.de/ - plan 9 from gopherspace gopher://redhill.net.nz/ - really great archive with all sorts of things

I will set mine up this summer. Thinking of starting a blog about my robots AI research on SDF. Also there is some stuff about the gopher protocol in Lainzine 1.

>Do you think gopher still has a place on the modern internet? The problem for me is that modern internet community is moving to encryption, decentralized and anonymous technology, such as SSL/TLS, Tor, i2p, ZeroNet, IPFS, Tahoe-LAFS, etc. And for me there's no way back. These two groups of technology is exclusive for me, you cannot have both retrospect tech and modern security. Go back mean your have exposed yourself to dragnet surveillance. I'd rather stay sway from them unfortunately. This is also the case of Usenet, it is amazing but due to the lack of security... I hope another technology, such as Zeronet or Syndie, to revive the architecture, idea and concept of Usenet, but not Usenet itself.

>>387 Usenet isn't insecure, you can use TLS and your IP is never involved.

I think gopher would actually be a very good protocol for simple stuff (ie blog posts, file sharing). Of course it doesn't work that well with many aspects of the modern web, like JS or streaming. The question therefore just boils down to what you want to do on the web, and for me personally, gopher would suffice for that. >>387 I don't think you understand any of the technologies you talk about in your post. There is nothing stopping you from, for example, just running your gopher server as a hidden server and having users connect to it through Tor.

>>396 Yes, of course we can run almost any TCP programs as a Hidden Service. But the problem is I'm not talking about the technology itself, but the community, and it lies on the existing infrastructure, especially the culture. If you are going to join this community and actually get involved, running a isolated island of Hidden Service won't cut it, you are not joining the community but created a new separate segment of it; and if you want to join it, your communication is exposed in cleartext, I'm really sick of the dragnet and I don't want to ruin my anonymity by running/accessing an instance, for e.g. blogging after much efforts to stay on the "darknet" community. Or at least I can operate one gopherhole in the gopherspace but I won't my latest hacking essay nor mentioning my experiences that I have shared anonymously for security reasons, thus I'm still not getting into the community. >>389 As of Usenet, even though it has SSL/TLS today, it cannot even guarantee the validity of a CANCEL message. And don't even mention the endless binary craps several terabytes per day and the fact that only someone who operates a Tier-2 ISP can run a usable archive, this has already killed the decentralized nature of the network. I really think Usenet is amazing system and I have spent endless time to dig and research the early history of anime/fandom/internet culture/memes from it (bring back /cyb/ or create /cult/ and I'd like to share my experience). Usenet itself, the existing system can't and won't be renewed, it is a sub-optimal mean of communication for the modern Internet. What suppose to revival, is its ideas or even components. We already seen NNTP being used to create decentralized imageboards. Personally I think Zeronet has a similar design and architecture and I hope there will be a Usenet-like system again someday...

>>413 >cancel It's like email. If you send something, don't expect to delete it. It's public. It's online. >binary Disgusting. Text-only is the way to go. >archive Unnecessary. Retain what you want on your personal computer, otherwise it's like an imageboard: transient. What you want from Usenet is for it to be a PHP webforum, and that's not what it is. Nothing against PHP webforums. If you want one, use one. Use the tools that accomplish the goal you have in life. >modern internet ``modern'' is a buzzword. Polite sage for not talking about gopher. A thread should be made about NNTP.

Gopher is one of my favourite protocols, because it's so simple. Unfortunately, that makes it very limited compared to (say) HTTP. For instance, the response of a Gopher server doesn't include the type of the file it's sending, it's up to the client to know what the type is. There's nothing like the HTTP "Accept" header, which allows the same URL to refer to different representations of the same content. There's no equivalent of the HTTP "Host" header, so one IP can't have multiple gopherspaces under different domains, they all have to be under the same domain and separated in the directory hierarchy. Actually, I think the last one is my main gripe with Gopher. Virtual hosts are such a convenient feature of HTTP servers, which Gopher just has no way of supporting.