alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I feel the same about Gander (the Canadian Bluesky-compatible startup). The only content on it is people talking about how it's not Twitter. One of my top three beefs with it.
Maybe they are passionate about themselves??
gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.
The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?
I've become stuck in a strange metaphor regarding this: Gopher, Gemini etc are like an indicator of "biodiversity". Like a species living happily inside a small, even tiny ecological niche, having discovered that they don't really need much more.
Small protocols don't (?) disturb the mainstream internet in any meaningful way, but they simply deserve an opportunity to "be". They'll never be "big" these days (or, maybe in the scifi-scenario of complete societal collapse?). The content might, indeed, be a from-geek-to-geek thing these days, but they're a lovely sign of cultural richness, different thinking patterns etc.