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Worth mentioning: the German daily "taz", one of the bigger newspapers (green/liberal/left leaning), offers to this day a full text Gopher site: gopher://taz.de, even as onion service gopher://ibpj4qv7mufde33w.onion
A good article on gopher in 2021:
https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standar...
a starting point is gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70
Not _that_ related, but why does everyone use monospace in these types of programs? I get that it looks nice, but you can re-produce the general look in a proportional font that's infinitely easier on the eyes.
A lot of gophermaps and files served on gopher have ASCII art headers that expect fixed-width text.
Lagrange, a Gemini browser rather than a Gopher client, has decent typography.
I do wish non-TUI Gopher clients would at least experiment with proportional typefaces, though.
I typically use gopherus[0]. Besides unixlikes, it works on DOS (I use it with FreeDOS), and has very low requirements (I believe it works on 8086 PCs).
Running the Java version quite smoothly in OpenBSD 7.1. Nice!
The name reminds me of the old Anarchie FTP search client :) Probably not the intention, but similar era.
This is bringing back quite some nostalgia - the internet used to be so much different!
Gophie is neat but I am hooked on Elpher.
My favorite websites are gopheresque
I spent a lot of time on gopher growing up (thanks SCN.org & my public library) but I still preferred simple-style websites then and do now...for some weird reason. I do find that I like at least a tiny bit of metaphor in some visual way. Could be a single tiny .gif icon even.
Gopher's still pretty fun, just a bit of an interest stacking order.
There is no real connection between the two but Gopher always makes me think of OS/2 since it was the platform I used Gopher on. There was a free PM Gopher client available which was written by an IBM employee on their own time.
That's pretty cool. OS/2 needed more of those things, special software benefits of using the OS. It was such a promising platform...I remember being kind of sad to move along.
Linux started really getting popular during OS/2's waning days but I'm not sure if OS/2 people really migrated or wanted to migrate in that direction.
OS/2 Warp was a work of art...
It makes me think of VMS/VAX because I ran a gopher server on a VAX
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
There's a resurgence in general against the "bloated web" where a chunk of people move back towards primarily text-based sharing of information and simplicity.
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.
> Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?
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.
If you'd like to know how it's worse...
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.
Sometimes, you just go online because you want to read about something. These days, it feels that most place on the web are designed to, well, do most anything other than let you have what you want to read without at the very least distracting the crap out of you, and often tracking you all over the place and suggesting that you read (or more often, WATCH) these other things that aren't actually what you asked for, and would you look at the time...
It's a lot like how some people read books sometimes even though movies are available.
>Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?
It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.
Off topic: can any suggest the easiest way to run a USENET/NNTP server (open source preferred)? I've Googled a bunch but cannot find a decent solution.
https://www.leafnode.org/ is decent if you just need a small instance. https://james.apache.org/ for more entreprisey stuff. And the old but reliable https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/
If on Windows, Hamster is easiest and most powerful: http://www.elfden.co.uk/hamster/conf.htm
Most web sites about it are in German, but the program itself has English language UI, as well.
There is also the derivative Hamster Next, which does proper server-to-server peering.
Seems like you got the easiest ways already, but perhaps the most fun way is through the Synchronet BBS system, which will run on Windows, Linux, or *BSD (not sure if this includes OS X...probably, with effort). It's primary purpose of course is to host an ANSI BBS, but it includes services for a web interface to the message base, as well as NNTP, gopher, ftp...heck, even POP/SMTP if you really wanna go nuts. And it'll interface just fine with the old Door games too through something like dosemu.
If NNTP is not your primary goal, public-inbox[1] will serve mailing list archives over NNTP (among other access methods).
And here I am just waiting for the revival of Hyper-G :-D
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper...
any interesting gopher site to visit?
Steven Frank, cofounder of Panic Inc., keeps his blog exclusively on gopher: gopher://stevenf.com:70/1. (He there links out to other gopher sites that may be of interest.)
Twitter users had fun trying to figure out wtf to do with that:
Some of the aggregators that I like:
Floodgap - generalist gopher portal with lots of links - gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/
Cosmic voyage: collective writing experiment - gopher://cosmic.voyage
Bongusta - phlogs aggregator & community - gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/bongusta/
SDF - phlogs aggregator & community - gopher://sdf.org
Tildeverse: aggregator for tilde communities - gopher://tildeverse.org
Gopherpedia: reading Wikipedia through Gopher because why not - gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1/
A video game wiki I use sometimes:
gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/
Games you can play on Gopher:
gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/
gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck
There was another HN Gopher thread recently:
SDF has a pretty comprehensive site, hosting tons of stuff: gopher://sdf.org
Codevoid: gopher://codevoid.de
Quux: gopher://gopher.quux.org
These are some public Gopher servers but not sure which ones are notable/ interesting: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=gopher+port%3A70
I'm cobbling a gopher site for a book of metaphysics. It doesn't work for clients yet, but I have the gopher server in replit here: https://replit.com/@agamus/metaphysikos?v=1
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://sdf.org
gopher://mozz.us
gopher://bitreich.org
gopher://hngopher.com (heh).
Seriously.
It looks and pretty and modern, but what does this client do that Lynx doesn't?
"The application requires a Java Runtime Environment 8".
Is there a reason for that, aren't current Java versions compatible?
I've also seen that with Freeplane, and it's always a stumbling block.
There is not even a JRE anymore. I guess they just don’t want to ship separate exe files to different platforms, but to answer your question, a modern JDK should work just fine.
The weird thing is that the code looks like it was written without an IDE! At the very least, IDEs hate the '*' imports, yet there's plenty.
Things like that are easily configured
> Gophie is written in plain Java for anyone and any system
It’s a shame it wasn’t written in Go for maximum confusion
Actually a Gopher client written in Go seems like a natural fit - a quick search finds this one: https://tildegit.org/sloum/Bombadillo - with TUI and vim keybindings for maximum nostalgia...
Should have written it in rust and posted it to r/golang