Wed, 09 Jan 2019 22:38:23 +0000

Is this fine?

The historical position of the gopher space and its network is secondary. The world uses HTTP. Uses the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol to transfer movies, documents, photos, books, audiobooks, ebooks, bills, death and birth certificates, etc, etc. To say it shortly - not Hyper Text documents. Why was gopher not as successful? Why are we even distressed with this question, as if we could change gopher to be succesful. I think that gopher would have been worse if it was in the position that HTTP is in. It is this abandonment of gopher that allowed it to become network of content creators and not of corporations. Cause how do you send data without POST requests, where the only option to sent data is through hasty CGIs. How can you have daily users without cookie files? How can you know what the resolution of the users screen is?

Our position is the position that happened often historically. As an example we can consider flourishing of the Greek philosophy during the Islamic golden era, or any writings that were preserved to the fact of nobody caring about them. And the most common texts of Aristotle were lost. We have the gopherspace of Aristotle, writings read by absolute elite and made to be perplexing. And Cicero talked how simple and clear Aristotle's writing is!

The main problem of gopherspace users (at least for my observations) is the fact how the internet is bad and most of the computing is doomed. But maybe this chaos is need for this type of heaven to exist, without the shitty web gopher would have to be shitty and be corporate network. The old gopher ads are eerily similar to old http ads. The networks were similar, but one got centralized organisation accepting lots of money and suggestions.

In my opinion, we ought to create methods for less tech adept people to use gopher from the admin side. Gopher is extremely easy to learn and to self-host. The fact that creating a burrow is very easy, and rss feeds can be created with a 30 line template make it a perfect network for personal pages, which in majority it is. There would be no problem of tumblr censoring gopher genitals. The genitals would be in the gopher hole, there for anyone to see them or follow them. I think even having a website on http web, still is not as secure and as "free" as the web is controlled with certificates, gigantic DNS corps, and Cloudfare and their friends.

To answer the question of the title - yes! It is fine, but we should not make gopherspace viable for corporations. Keep it personal space, make setting up personal gopherholes even easier (maybe even GUI for that, I know this sounds like a heresy!). The qualitative changes that would come from this change of quantity would only benefit gopher sphere as the personal network, the network of creators, and not of corporations and services. On gopher you are the service.

To pessimists out there, who speak that design of gopher can be changed, we have one network that has been kept the anti-corporate space for years. The BitTorrent protocol. I don't think further comment is needed on this. And there were attempts on making it profitable, and all of them look like jokes on what was done to the HTTP internet.