Why Gopher in 2026?
gopher.muffinlabs.com
gopher.muffinlabs.com
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.
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
Even if you aren't a user, almost certainly someone who has your number is. :(
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. Many complain. People classify it alongside other mental health issues.
It's a bug, not a feature. Would anyone without it wish for it? Would anyone with it and given the choice for it to be gone choose to keep it?
Balance. The inability to "focus" attention at the likely relevant thing as a matter of course is suboptimal. You don't want to get distracted by the wrong thing when it is a matter of life and death.
I don't know that your theory is any more likely than a theory of ADHD being less likely in those before-times because it would get you killed because you're not paying attention to the right stuff and nature then stomps on you. Not that I have any reason to believe this idea.
Being good in emergencies is not a trait you need often, but very valuable when you do need it.
I think of it like the doorway effect, the working memory is dumped more often to have more resources for processing sudden events.
ADHD is most often regarded as a problem in children. Children are generally expected to behave in ways that are hard for those with ADHD (sitting still for long periods etc.) to an extent that adults are not.
Lots of things make your life harder. Lots of places where being a woman, or having the wrong skin colour or being gay got in the way of "successful, effortless living" and we generally took the view that society needed to change. All of those have been treated as mental health issues to at least some extent (e.g. "hysteria" for women, hormone treatment for people like Turing) too.
Being too intelligent can be a problem too. Does that mean high intelligence is a bug?
> Would anyone without it wish for it? Would anyone with it and given the choice for it to be gone choose to keep it?
Why would anyone want to be good at dealing with emergencies, or being able to focus intently on things they are good at?
So you could argue that if you are on the boundary, whether you have ADHD traits to the extent of being a disorder depends on the environment you find yourself in, and so you could characterise that as some aspects of that environment 'giving you ADHD', but it's still not yourself changing.
Today we don't need sci-fi/cyberpunk movies/books to actually have that as properly diagnosed biological/psychological problem, not many know how to deal with unless you get prescriptions for soft-amphetamine variance given as a medicine so one can kill extra thoughts running crazy inside or... go mental and/or depressed. and trust me.. I have 2 at home. so it's not that I'm judgemental.. it's just my daily routine to deal with a challenge that outside drug.. slowing down and getting offline.. actually helps equally vs. everybody believes we can be celebrities online for 72h then nobody cares... actually never cared so here comes the attention drama to 10k other thoughts, brains tells you is important.
I can assure you... all the online mess ain't helping all of you who suffer it, unless you're brilliantly intelligent people (many are) who are highly functional, considering the energy burnout that requires you to stay above the water line.
That doesn't necessarily mean its genetic, families often have similar environmental conditions as well.
An here's a twin study which shows environmental effects are negligible compared to genetics: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4071160/ . I've seen a description from another reasearcher that it is "about as heritable as height" (and yes, environmental factors can affect that as well, but mainly it being reduced by malnutrition. With good nutrition, height is also mostly genetic).
The first example doesn't hold much water for me personally, I wouldn't expect a reputable psychiatrist to make a scientific claim based on undiagnosed conditions...if they weren't diagnosed its not a viable datum.
I'd have guessed, and could be very wrong, that we only know genetics that may be at play after symptoms arise and that finding said traits in people without symptoms is an indicator those genes may not be directly at play in the condition.
(I'm similar, in that I don't tend to take my meds on holidays, partly because travelling with them is a pain but also they're not really necessary for me to enjoy myself on holiday. I also find RTS games are a good way to 'quiten' my mind because the game demands so much urgent focus)
People like you were the explorers, defenders and scouts, lookouts of modern primitive tribes.
The currently over reproduced neurotype, the empathizers-socializers are general workers. But people with neurodivergence specialize in ways that can't be reproduced by typical humans.
Scenario 1: video calls
I live abroad. The family, including a 80+ grandmother, has Androids, iPhones, computers. If I were to run something, maintenance would be limited to a few times per year, and I couldn't be there when they get a new device. Besides, remote support on android is virtually impossible.
I'm a veteran sysadmin and I have an XMPP ecosystem working with video calls & all, but that is not common. It needs a secured TURN/STUN server beyond a well configured XMPP one, DNS service entries, etc. For someone less experienced I can clearly see that being a nightmare.
Scenario 2: mailing lists
I'd absolutely run to communicate with the group of people I run classes for on mailing lists, except mailing lists are essentially dead since DKIM/DMARC. DKIMv2 might address this, but if you ask people, especially young ones, they'll look at you as if you're from Mars.
Summary
I'd absolutely love to have a non-profit, cross-platform video call app that comes pre-installed everywhere, just as the phone (aka voice) "app" is there, but there's zero incentive from the current ecosystem for such thing. I'm aware of carrier-level video calls, but I seriously doubt it's used a lot.
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.
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.
I think the barrier is much more a matter of awareness of how web sites can be created than actual technical limitations.
One of the big problems with the Web is that it's all ephemeral, it not a question of if it breaks, but when and how badly. A book doesn't disappear from your shelves just because the author lost interesting or the publisher goes out of business, but websites disappear from your bookmarks like that all the time. That's what needs fixing.
The other part is HTML itself. You shouldn't need to write raw HTML to write a website. That's the job of the browser. The very first browser that Tim Berners-Lee wrote supported editing, but that got completely lost over the years. A little bit still exist in the form of the 'contentEditable' attribute, but you can't author websites with that all by yourself, as there is no means of saving or publishing the results. No modern browser supports WebDAV either.
Does Nostr address this? Even things like freenet, tor, i2p rely on third parties...just more third parties than the traditional web, with the idea being that more means more uptime and less individual power.
But if you spin up a nostr (or any of the above) relay after the others have shuttered, you'll have no data because there are no peers. Torrents are fairly durable because there's usually at least one peer, but when there isn't, there just isn't.
>A book doesn't disappear from your shelves just because the author lost interesting That's because the book is actually on your shelf. If you have local backups of websites, they don't disappear quite so easily. The web is just the library but on the web - you send a request to borrow, they let you if they have a copy, what you do with that copy is up to you and your legal system.
>You shouldn't need to write raw HTML to write a website wysiwyg editors are better than ever, no? Plenty of themes available to take the burden of CSS off. Plenty of engines to take the pressure of JS off. Even in-browser IDEs and the inspect window if you do want to play with the code.
Yes, as Nostr and Freenet disconnect the storage location from the document identifier. Thus your link keeps working, even if the servers change.
The problem with the Web isn't a lack of cheap storage or people willing to mirror content, it's that none of that matters when the links keep breaking anyway and nobody can find the content anymore.
For how to do it right, see Usenet, the messages are held together by unique message-ids and the protocol was designed for distribution. Thus archives could be put together from random backup tapes and even 45 years later, you can browse and read the discussion threads.
Your average web forum just disappears when something goes wrong and even if somebody has mirrored the HTML, they'd have a rather bad time trying to recreate the original database, since the HTML is really more like screenshots of a GUI than the actual content.
> The web is just the library but on the web
Many countries have a legal requirement that every book published has to be send to the national library. We also have ISBNs that uniquely identify books. We have nothing like that in place for websites.
> they don't disappear quite so easily.
A local copy doesn't preserve it on the Web. Even if you wanted to preserve it on the Web, you can't, since the original domain belongs to somebody else.
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.
What a blast from the past to see SDF.org make it to HN in 2026. Proud grandpa. lol.
As I understand it you would need ARPA membership (currently one off $36 payment) before you can have MetaARPA ($36/year). Even if having to spend time at ARPA is waived for those with a good cause[0]
If you've forgotten your password things are trickier [1].
Among many, many other services, you can get your own Gopher or Gemini site there.
I really like the Lagrange browser, which works with both Gopher and Gemini: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
Another excellent Gopher resource that hasn’t been mentioned here yet: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw
Gopher is still quite active, and there’s lots to read. Gemini, from what I’ve seen, is less so. A lot of what I’ve seen is just cross-posted between Gopher/Gemini or even Gopher/Gemini/WWW, so there’s not much point to it.
You’ll also see a lot of “I’ve just discovered Gemini! Here’s why I think it’s awesome.” And then, they never post again. There's a good amount of that on Gopher as well, but you'll also find lots of Gopherholes that have been active for years.
Still, though, I think Gemini has a lot of potential. It’s a much more pleasant browsing experience than today’s web, but it’s had trouble finding a niche so far.
There’s one group of people who think that it doesn’t really solve any problems not already solved by Gopher, and there’s another group that just cross-posts all of their content to the web to maximize its potential audience, which kind of defeats the point.
I tried to focus on keeping with the Apple HIG from the 1990s, while also making it more aligned with modern browser principles.
Here we go, my Gohper server baked by ATproto :
- https://forge.l3x.in/alex/crystalgoph - gopher://gopher.l3x.in
Very much alpha quality, but it's already working relatively well with e.g. lynx
unset LESSOPEN
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
gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.
You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
stargate.gemi.dev:1994
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
There are also a few variants of Rust ports too (i like https://github.com/zevaryx/rettui for a full nomadnet replacement)
I hold the controversial opinion that encryption can be an anti-feature on the "small web". One of the reason is technical: encryption takes computing resources, and can hardly be made time proof, as it has to evolve in response to threats, and certificates tend to have expiration dates. The other is more philosophical: you use encryption when you want to share secrets: personal data, passwords, credit card numbers, etc... A system that doesn't support encryption doesn't support transfer of personal data, accounts or commercial transactions, which I believe is a good thing in this niche. There is no shortage of secure communication systems when you need one, let that niche stay a niche.
Your point about not having encryption is really quite interesting to me. I would want to add some form of signing to prove something came from somewhere unaltered, but that would go against the idea.
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.