Why Gopher?
So, why bother with a dated and limited protocol? Different people
have different reasons, here is a brief summary of some of the more
common ones:
• The limitation to plain text makes for a quiet and uniform visual
environment. A web page doesn't have to be visually noisy, but they
frequently are. Gopherspace is therefore much calmer. Calm is a
rare commodity in today's environment. It also allows one to focus
on the content.
• Gopherspace is entirely non-commercial. No-one is trying to sell
you something or track your behaviour so they can sell your
information to someone else who wants to sell you something.
(There's nothing that forces this, and back in the day there were
occasionaly advertisements on Gopher, but marketers aren't
interested in small populations on antique protocols.)
It attracts people who are refugees from social media (or hold-outs
who never adopted it in the first place).
• It's efficient. A page of plain text is a few kilobytes. A web page
can be efficient, but they are often not. Even well-designed pages
with scritps and images run to hundreds of kilobytes, and megabytes
are not uncommon if there are videos (adverts, say).
(This has practical advantages if one is using a limited device over
a slow link, and one might contemplate the energy being spent
transmitting and processing content of little interest to the
viewer in many web pages.)
• It's simple. In a few minutes you can learn all you need to about
how to create readable plain text documents, and one or two things to
know about creating gopher links.
Even the most basic HTML authoring will take perhaps twice as long,
and producing a page acceptable on today's web is a specialist
skill.
• It's simple (II). The protocol is so simple a decent programmer
could produce a simple client in a weekend. Many people have
written their own. Contrast this with a web browser, which is
a massive software engineering effort these days.
This has endeared itself to programmers of a DIY mindset.
So, a protocol for technology hipsters, in other words.
Here are some perspectives:
TEXT My personal take
TEXT Kagu Tsuchi's take
TEXT Cameron Kaiser's 'Why Gopher is Still Relevant'
TEXT Bjorn Karger's Gopher Manifesto
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Gophered by Gophernicus/3.0.1 on Debian/10 x86_64