2018-03-06
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WARNING: This post is quite meta, so if you don't like reading such
things, feel free to skip this. It is not important at all...

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Some nice folks on the gophersphere seem to have picked up my last
post[0] about 'What makes gopher special' for me.  My thanks go to
kvothe[2] and jynx[3] for their thoughtful additions.  We seem to
have an overlap in our observations which is reassuring for me. I
am not that too far off :)

Tomasino[1] takes the arguments a step further in the direction of
community which leads me to this response. I have recently read an
article by David Chapman written in 2015: 'Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths
in subculture evolution'[4].  That's quite a mouthful but apart
from the sociopath twist in that story it shows that communities
have a life cycle. They start out small and when they grow, their
established core values are up for a test.

We have seen this elsewhere when mastodon became popular, driving
out quite a bit of the rich subculture of LBGT people that choose
this platform as their interaction place.  I do think though that
gopher will stay as it is for a long time. This is mostly due to 2
reasons.

As tomasino wrote the 'technology' used for gopher holes is quite
low tech compared to other monstrosities these days.  But -- I add
--  is so far off the mainstream interaction model that there is
no 'easy' switching from another platform.  You just don't give up
your blog for a gopher site because you think that's right. (Well
I seem to, but that's just me)

There is really no incentive for any (capitalist or otherwise)
exploitative strategy. There is nothing to be gained by using gopher
apart from the stated reasons previously. And technical simplicity
seems a lofty goal everyone touts about but rarely implements at
work.

This seems to be the healthiest defense for the community if it
ever needs one.

That and respect for your fellow writers, but I take that as a
given.

This all does not seem too thoughtful to me now as I read it again,
but I will leave this with you anyway.

Cheers!


___References________________________________________________________

[0]: gopher://vernunftzentrum.de:70/0/ckeen/phlog/2018-03-05-What-makes-gopher-special-for-me.md
[1]: gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20180305-what-makes-gopher-special
[2]: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/kvothe/phlog/2018/03/05-special-gopher
[3]: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20180305.post
[4]: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths