Rendered at 12:39:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
hollowonepl 4 hours ago [-]
Gopher or not.. there are BBSes, there are many ways just to stop doom scrolling, avoid surveillance economy as much as possible and live offline with a book (not a kindle device) on your knees. and yes.. most of the ADHD generation with depressions, self-identification problems that we see today is exactly because tech made them this way.. or social media most of all.
I came back to simpler life some years ago. Being close to 50yo punk rocker who every time when asked to reply on Whatsapp answers "I don't have Whatsapp, if you want to call me you should afford to call me without making Zuck richer at your own cost". and people.. are.. bamboozled in most cases and just carry on doom scrolling themselves.
I don't. I finally have time again for movies, books, games and deeper communication with fewer and just occasionally pop up in more... I hope, moderated places like even here (although Hacker News that mixes tech, politics and food links is not exactly Hacker to me anymore and that's where actually some harder moderation would be beneficial here instead of just letting cry outs down voting just because we may have different opinions).
World is screwed as this guy described in his phlog. Hard to believe river can be turned back with a stick as we say in my country... but skipping as much BS as possible and "don't feed the troll" should be rephrased as don't support social media barons and political adversaries who manipulate us via non-moderated pseudo journalism.. not just punishing simple people who just want simple lives.
I personally miss times when netiquette (the one that emerged from early UNIX and USENET communities) was still the thing in the net. At full extend.
alexfortin 3 hours ago [-]
I tend to agree, actually I recently blogged[0] about something related but more in general I think it's totally doable to have a sane and very enjoyable digital life today too, perhaps even more than in the past, but it takes effort, of course, like everything valuable in life usually does.
> most of the ADHD generation with depressions, self-identification problems that we see today is exactly because tech made them this way..
Are you suggesting ADHD is something you can "get"?
_heimdall 8 minutes ago [-]
Are you proposing that its entirely genetic with no environmental factors?
graemep 1 hours ago [-]
Are you saying it is not?
Given we do not know what causes ADHD, and there is disagreement over whether it is a difference or a deficiency, its quite hard to have any definitive answers about it.
Given symptoms of ADHD include things like being better in emergencies and being able to to focus more intently on certain things my view is that it is a difference that society is unwilling to tolerate and is therefore treated as a problem to be fixed.
andsoitis 12 minutes ago [-]
> there is disagreement over whether it is a difference or a deficiency,
Deficiency, since it gets in the way of successful, effortless living.
People say they "suffer" from ADHD and use it as an explanation why some things harder for them than for others, etc. Some complain.
agumonkey 3 hours ago [-]
I do agree that spending time outside of the current internet field of distortion is quite pleasurable. I'm still dumbfounded how we pivoted from an ok-old-world with a bit of cyberspace fun to dopamine altering doomscrolling.
thenthenthen 4 hours ago [-]
We are so many steps deeper in. It is now a (payed) privilege of you have the affordance to not be totally connected and the other stuff you mentioned. Currently in a place that is very sobering in that sense.
wtch98 2 hours ago [-]
> I don't have Whatsapp, if you want to call me you should afford to call me without making Zuck richer at your own cost
I still don't get how whatsapp makes any money from me. I do know that if I phone someone on my phone the connection is terrible, if I make a voice call on whatsapp it's a far better quality.
> I personally miss times when netiquette (the one that emerged from early UNIX and USENET communities) was still the thing in the net.
Eternal September, the gift that keeps on giving
prologic 12 hours ago [-]
I still think Gopher (the protocol that is) is still very relevant today. The beauty of it really is in its simplicity. Great to see that the library I wrote all those years ago is still being used :D
I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.
NoboruWataya 1 hours ago [-]
I usually check in on gemini://antenna.michaelnordmeyer.com/ and think the content is a bit broader than you suggest. Recent posts cover topics like OpenBSD, Disney movies, Arch Linux, UK local radio, socks, books, and so on. Yes, there are a number of posts about Gemini, too, but it's a minority.
marttt 7 hours ago [-]
I've become stuck in a strange metaphor regarding this: Gopher, Gemini etc are like an indicator of "biodiversity". Like a species living happily inside a small, even tiny ecological niche, having discovered that they don't really need much more.
Small protocols don't (?) disturb the mainstream internet in any meaningful way, but they simply deserve an opportunity to "be". They'll never be "big" these days (or, maybe in the scifi-scenario of complete societal collapse?). The content might, indeed, be a from-geek-to-geek thing these days, but they're a lovely sign of cultural richness, different thinking patterns etc.
grumbel 2 hours ago [-]
That's one big issue, but I feel like the even bigger one is that neither of them fixes what's wrong with HTTP: Publishing is not a first-class citizen on the net.
As long as you need to rent servers and domain names all those alternatives are a waste of time, as they are just repeating all the missteps from HTTP. We need an alternative where you can type some text, hit publish and have it appear on the net with zero friction and in a way that isn't tied to a single third party. Publishing a site needs to be as easy as browsing one.
So far Nostr it's the only thing that gets close at the protocol level, but still lacks a good client.
abc123abc123 2 hours ago [-]
What are you missing? Just write a bot that pulls interesting content into gopher, and start filling it. Since the protocol is so easy, nothing could be easier.
II2II 1 hours ago [-]
I am not looking for particular content, just for something that is interesting to read. Typically, that falls into the realm of things that people are passionate about. It may be a project. It may be an issue. It may be something they research in their spare time. It may be silly, or it may be serious.
While extolling the virtues of the protocol may fit in that, it gets excessive. Blogs that border on diaries strike me as too personal.
It's not that I'm looking for something on the scale or scope of the web. People have already written bots that pull over interesting content anyhow. What I am looking for is an environment that I'm comfortable with participating in.
post-it 9 hours ago [-]
I feel the same about Gander (the Canadian Bluesky-compatible startup). The only content on it is people talking about how it's not Twitter. One of my top three beefs with it.
Vaushite 9 hours ago [-]
I think these projects focus way too much on platform building than content acquisition. The valuable platform is the one where the content is, whether that's celebrity feeds or professional networking. It doesn't matter how technically good your platform is if there's no casual reason to visit.
vconnor 6 hours ago [-]
The early years of BlueSky were people talking about how it’s not Twitter.
People stick to a social network, and when they move is because they have big complaints about their previous home. If they didn’t, they would never have moved at all.
That’s probably the biggest lesson of the Web 2.0 era that everybody that tried to create a new social network had to learn.
anthk 10 hours ago [-]
gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.
warkdarrior 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe they are passionate about themselves??
hujun236 10 hours ago [-]
The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?
rektlessness 8 hours ago [-]
Proud exSDF member from the old days.
SDF was considered 'vintage' back when i joined so must be doubly so now.
Was introduced to Gopher back then too, along with NetBSD.
What a blast from the past to see SDF.org make it to HN in 2026.
Proud grandpa. lol.
rustyhancock 5 hours ago [-]
Why exSDF member? Your account is surely still there waiting for you!
Kwpolska 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what's Gopher-specific in this article. While HTTP is more complicated and more capable, it is still something a human can understand, and it is still possible to make a HTTP request using nothing but netcat.
ecliptik 9 hours ago [-]
Few months ago I had Claude build me a Gopher browser for Classic Macintosh systems, geomys[1]. I was using TurboGopher[2] before then, and it worked, but had a lot of design choices that are clunky today.
I tried to focus on keeping with the Apple HIG from the 1990s, while also making it more aligned with modern browser principles.
Time to stop posting about these, there’s no rush for them to have their Eternal September moment. Let us enjoy the good vibes for a while longer.
anthk 12 hours ago [-]
Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less,
do yourself a favour. Run
unset LESSOPEN
or have it at ~/.profile.
Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.
On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.
As a start, there's:
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://sdf.org
For gemini,
gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.
'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.
You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
stargate.gemi.dev:1994
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.
For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.
billyhoffman 9 hours ago [-]
I run gemi.dev, so it was nice to see it here.
I recently built a Gemini client for people who like GUI's more than TUI's, and want a native macOS app
tldr I despise fakirs who misunderstand "the path to good things may involve suffering" as "if you suffer, you'll get good things". There is no reason for monospace with fixed wrapping.
Yes, everyone got fed up with "modern" ways, partly that is the reason AI raise as a simple, plaintext summary. Even on this "gopher site" i have to block css for "less is more"...
hugodan 4 hours ago [-]
i would love it to have support for images, but maybe i'm missing the point i guess
jmclnx 12 hours ago [-]
Why ? It is not owned and controlled by billionaires. Plus no AI slop being spammed to gopher sites.
FWIW, the same applies to gemini protocol.
cowlevel 11 hours ago [-]
Same applies to HTTP too though
quimawen 5 hours ago [-]
This is a useful angle on Go. I'd want to see how it holds outside the initial conditions.
I came back to simpler life some years ago. Being close to 50yo punk rocker who every time when asked to reply on Whatsapp answers "I don't have Whatsapp, if you want to call me you should afford to call me without making Zuck richer at your own cost". and people.. are.. bamboozled in most cases and just carry on doom scrolling themselves.
I don't. I finally have time again for movies, books, games and deeper communication with fewer and just occasionally pop up in more... I hope, moderated places like even here (although Hacker News that mixes tech, politics and food links is not exactly Hacker to me anymore and that's where actually some harder moderation would be beneficial here instead of just letting cry outs down voting just because we may have different opinions).
World is screwed as this guy described in his phlog. Hard to believe river can be turned back with a stick as we say in my country... but skipping as much BS as possible and "don't feed the troll" should be rephrased as don't support social media barons and political adversaries who manipulate us via non-moderated pseudo journalism.. not just punishing simple people who just want simple lives.
I personally miss times when netiquette (the one that emerged from early UNIX and USENET communities) was still the thing in the net. At full extend.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015169
Are you suggesting ADHD is something you can "get"?
Given we do not know what causes ADHD, and there is disagreement over whether it is a difference or a deficiency, its quite hard to have any definitive answers about it.
Given symptoms of ADHD include things like being better in emergencies and being able to to focus more intently on certain things my view is that it is a difference that society is unwilling to tolerate and is therefore treated as a problem to be fixed.
Deficiency, since it gets in the way of successful, effortless living.
People say they "suffer" from ADHD and use it as an explanation why some things harder for them than for others, etc. Some complain.
I still don't get how whatsapp makes any money from me. I do know that if I phone someone on my phone the connection is terrible, if I make a voice call on whatsapp it's a far better quality.
> I personally miss times when netiquette (the one that emerged from early UNIX and USENET communities) was still the thing in the net.
Eternal September, the gift that keeps on giving
https://pkg.go.dev/git.mills.io/prologic/go-gopher
Small protocols don't (?) disturb the mainstream internet in any meaningful way, but they simply deserve an opportunity to "be". They'll never be "big" these days (or, maybe in the scifi-scenario of complete societal collapse?). The content might, indeed, be a from-geek-to-geek thing these days, but they're a lovely sign of cultural richness, different thinking patterns etc.
As long as you need to rent servers and domain names all those alternatives are a waste of time, as they are just repeating all the missteps from HTTP. We need an alternative where you can type some text, hit publish and have it appear on the net with zero friction and in a way that isn't tied to a single third party. Publishing a site needs to be as easy as browsing one.
So far Nostr it's the only thing that gets close at the protocol level, but still lacks a good client.
While extolling the virtues of the protocol may fit in that, it gets excessive. Blogs that border on diaries strike me as too personal.
It's not that I'm looking for something on the scale or scope of the web. People have already written bots that pull over interesting content anyhow. What I am looking for is an environment that I'm comfortable with participating in.
People stick to a social network, and when they move is because they have big complaints about their previous home. If they didn’t, they would never have moved at all.
That’s probably the biggest lesson of the Web 2.0 era that everybody that tried to create a new social network had to learn.
What a blast from the past to see SDF.org make it to HN in 2026. Proud grandpa. lol.
I tried to focus on keeping with the Apple HIG from the 1990s, while also making it more aligned with modern browser principles.
1. https://github.com/ecliptik/geomys
2. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/265-turbogopher
- https://reticulum.network
Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.
On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.
As a start, there's:
For gemini, 'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.
I recently built a Gemini client for people who like GUI's more than TUI's, and want a native macOS app
https://github.com/acidus99/MajorTom
Yes, everyone got fed up with "modern" ways, partly that is the reason AI raise as a simple, plaintext summary. Even on this "gopher site" i have to block css for "less is more"...
FWIW, the same applies to gemini protocol.