
Gopherspace in the Year 2020 - sT370ma2
https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/gopherspace.html
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xelxebar
I love that gopherpedia (Wikipedia over Gopher) is a thing. Probably one of
the best lynx experiences one can have.

My first introduction to Gopher was actually by recently bumping into Gemini
[0], which tries to fix a lot of the known problems with Gopher.

The Gemini protocol is still super small and pretty slick---definitely worth
the 30 minute read. The simplicity also means that a lot of clients already
exist [1]. I've been using Bombadillo [2], which supports Gopher, Finger, as
well as standard HTTP(S) if you enable a flag.

[0]:[https://gemini.circumlunar.space/](https://gemini.circumlunar.space/)

[1]:[https://gemini.circumlunar.space/clients.html](https://gemini.circumlunar.space/clients.html)

[2]:[https://rawtext.club/~sloum/bombadillo.html](https://rawtext.club/~sloum/bombadillo.html)

~~~
Grumbledour
Does the gopherpedia just strip out inline links? This seems like a big trade
off to me. And the formatting seems also a bit plain which makes things like
source code hard to read.

Though I think this is my biggest gripe with Gopher or Gemini. I love the idea
of going back to a more text focused web where the user decides how to consume
content, but I really don't get the like for plain text. I still want it to be
rich text, regarding formatting and semantic meaning. Plain Text just seems
tedious.

~~~
davegauer
Completely agree about Gopher. I still love it, but it has some real pain
points.

Gemini, on the other hand, has links, preformatted blocks, headings, quotes,
lists, etc. as part of the content specification.

By keeping most of the visual _formatting_ out of the hands of the author, the
content can be rendered however the user/client wants to display (or hear!)
it. It can be viewed raw in a terminal or it can be typographically beautiful.
There are even some clever efforts to apply different styles to different
sites.

The other appeal is to be able to _author_ content very easily. The
text/gemini formatting is so simple/conventional, you pretty much already know
it without trying. But its simplicity also lowers the barrier to building
tools around it for authoring, displaying, syntax highlighting, and so on.

(Gopher is also pretty easy, but the menu format is an arcane artifact from
The Old Days and annoying to write by hand. Content is "plain text" by
convention, but there is absolutely _no_ specification about line wrapping,
character encoding, etc. so it's not as simple as it looks either. The lack of
links in content leads some folks to use menus _as_ content - tooling helps,
but...yuck.)

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stargrave
SGBlog ([http://sgblog.stargrave.org/](http://sgblog.stargrave.org/)) is Git-
backed blogging engine with gopher protocol support (for making plogs). Out of
the box, just with inetd.

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sbassi
What about setting up a Gopher server?

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Jemm
We need a website that tunnels gopher to html

