#gopher

It's neat to see so many people talking about doing weird things within he Gopher protocol.

I'm excited, especially because I feel at least partially responsible for keeping this conversation rolling.

I'm also seeing some pretty negative comments, both from folks that don't understand why we'd wanna do this, and from folks that use gopher now and see our ideas as evil and bad and worthy of ridicule.

That's less neat.

This is a thread.

Doing silly things with Gopher is neat! You wanna serve DAT via gopher? Cool! That's neat! You wanna implement SSL? You wanna use it like the web? Great!

It will not hurt people who use gopher the way it has been used for ~30 years. It won't break things. Those folks can ignore what we're doing.

This doesn't have to be antagonistic. If you don't wanna take part, that's cool! I'm not here to force you. Keep doing what you're doing, or do what we're doing. Either is wonderful.

What I want:

- A gopher client with the ability for the user to select fonts and colors for menus.

- A gopher client that renders HTML, Markdown and Plaintext.

- While rendering HTML, it explicitly ignores any scripting or styling (aside from anything the user has defined.)

- The client offers users the option to download and render inline images in HTML and markdown files (but only over gopher)

- Links within HTML and Markdown files to work the same as in menus.

- This HTML and Markdown rendering is entirely optional, you can just as easily download the files and render them somewhere else.

- I personally prefer Markdown to plaintext in pretty much all contexts, because people *already* use markdown formatting in plain text, and I'd rather read an unrendered markdown file than something with _no_ links, etc. So I want to see more gopher publishers publishing markdown.

- I want more gopher servers,

- I want more scripts for publishing to gopher. I really like the descriptions I've read of the phlog software on SDF, but I've never used it.

That's pretty much it. Beyond that, I just want to see more people hosting Gopher sites on their home computers. I want to see more people focusing on substance over style.

Security/Encryption -
Long term, yeah, this is probably something we need.

I don't know of a way to do SSL style encryption over gopher at this time. I don't know if this would even really be valuable. For my personal use, I'm fine with SSHing to another server, and doing my gophering from there. No one local is snooping, at least.

If you need security, use .onion you know?

So yes! Security and encryption is something someone can build. Implement it in a way that's backwards compatible. At the very least, it won't hurt anything.

But also, if you need security go use something designed to be secure.

- Gopher + DAT: This sounds absolutely wild and ridiculous. Go for it! I dunno why you'd want that, but if you do, go for it.

- Other Gopher "abuse:
As long as you don't break backwards compat, do whatever.

The Gopher protocol was written in like 1991 or something? And it will run pretty much anywhere.

The protocol is so simple that you can hack together a client in a few dozen lines of whatever.

You can implement clients on 8 bit hardware. It will be faster and easier to use and more accessible than a web browser.

It's been around forever. It's simple. It works well. It provides just enough functionality to get you to your content.

Plus, most modern Gopher servers provide an HTTP gateway. (See http://gopher.ofmanytrades.com)

So even if you think that we should just focus on making the web less antagonistic towards users, we can use gopher as one avenue towards that.

Gopher isn't ever going to replace the web.

That's not my goal. That's not anyone's goal.

Gopher is just a weird little non-capitalist, human scale way for us to publish and consume stuff.

It's fun, it's easy, and it's a weird way for folks (like you and me) to resist, in our own small way, the shit that the big centralized services do, and the things that netflix pushed the w3c in to doing.

I guess I gotta talk about the w3c a second, too.

The modern web is kind of crap. I won't rehash that here, but you know it's crap.

The w3c has moved to make it more crap by bundling DRM in our web browsers, and making it a felony to do security research on browsers that include that DRM.

This is *real* bad.

That's my biggest reason for embracing this gopher stuff.

The w3c sold us out, and the web browser isn't, can't be, truly safe anymore.

We don't need more #DRM in our lives. We don't need more very complex software that no one understands.

Simple software, when possible, is better software.

the #w3c fucked us when they voted to allow #EME without even basic protection for security research.

But before that, Google and Facebook screwed us over by stuffing more and more javascript in to our pages, and normalizing more tracking everywhere.