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We Must Revive Gopherspace (2017)
- giancarlostoro 8y agoWhat do Gopher pages look like, are they mostly ascii or is the format weird? Why did HTML/HTTP become the standard over Gopher? It seems like Gopher could be capable of doing similar things to the web, just nobody bothered to expand on it or the standard is frozen in time.
- decebalus1 8y agoWith the risk of sounding patronizing, the wikipedia page provides answers to all your questions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
- giancarlostoro 8y agoThank you, I appreciate the link. It's been a while since I've looked at that page, so I probably forgot about some of what is there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- classichasclass 8y agoI think the unchecked expansion of arguably questionable capabilities is exactly what the author's objection is. Otherwise, it just makes Gopher into an unnecessary second-rate HTTP. (Disclaimer: I maintain gopher.floodgap.com)
- icebraining 8y agoHTML ain't the problem; you can build websites without tracking. If you somehow managed to pull enough users to Gopher, they'd just write Gopher Chrome and start adding new features that conveniently allow tracking into it, and gradually kill off the original protocol (see EEE). The problem is economic, and the solution must be too.
- helij 8y agoIndeed[1] You always have a choice! [1] https://artlists.org/privacy-policy/ https://artlists.org/privacy-policy/
- petra 8y agoSay we've built the system of economic incentives for privacy(opt-in). And managed to convince 10% of users and 50% of site owners to convert. Extremely hard. What do users get in the end ? half of the web is still tracking them. And many of the big guys still track them. Not enough if you ask me. That's what makes it so difficult. So let's solve that: let's build a search engine that let me filter sites according to privacy, Ah and be perceived as good as google - because in today's world, in many jobs, you cannot give up on an information advantage. That's kind of an impossible mission.
- m-p-3 8y agoDuckDuckGo should implement that, or at least put a privacy indicator.
- mattkevan 8y agoThey do. Their browser plugin grades sites both on the number of tracking scripts and the quality of their privacy policy. https://duck.co/help/desktop/adding-duckduckgo-to-your-browser https://duck.co/help/desktop/adding-duckduckgo-to-your-brows...
- bunderbunder 8y agoMoving to another protocol, like Gopher, seems like an economic solution to me. A parallel protocol and hypermedia format that's restricted enough to prevent tracking isn't going to attract everyone. It's going to attract the subset of users who care enough about stuff privacy to give up "rich Web" features like single page applications and animated HTML canvas elements in return. That's not a group that's likely to start immediately demanding to to build in the features needed to create infiniscrolling Pinterest feeds. And it's also going to be a much restricted group, meaning businesses won't stand to profit much by pushing for it. So there might not be any economic incentive to do it. At least, that's how it might be at first. If it remains a nice place to be for 5 years, I'd call it a decent run. 10, and I'd be ecstatic.
- MistahKoala 8y agoThe article discusses reviving gopher, but doesn't mention how to access it (sure, I could invest a bit of time and effort googling how to do that, but that seems beside point for an article evangelising its revival).
- Joe-Z 8y agoYes, I was a little disappointed by that too. It even has a "gopher://..." link at the end and when I click on it I can't even open it. Just tell me how I can open the one example you provide man!
- pexaizix 8y agoReally you can't google "gopher client [your OS]"?
- SauciestGNU 8y agoI use lynx to view gopher content, although I did write a gopher client in ruby with ncurses at one point for fun.
- JdeBP 8y agoThere was a time when gopher: scheme URLs would just work, because GOPHER support was built in to popular WWW browsers. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both had it, for example. It's not that gopher: is some novelty that no-one has ever adopted. It's that a WWW browser nowadays lacks quite a lot of things that used to be commonly built-in to WWW browsers. gopher: scheme support has gone completely, as has news: support. ftp: support has been reimplemented several times, and is significantly poorer now than it used to be. * http://jdebp.eu./FGA/web-browser-ftp-hall-of-shame.html http://jdebp.eu./FGA/web-browser-ftp-hall-of-shame.html
- classichasclass 8y agoAt the risk of shameless self-promotion, there are Firefox add-ons and at least several mobile clients. Disclaimer: I wrote a number of the ones on this page. https://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ https://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ (Yes, it's accessible over Gopher too, just to be difficult)
- mahkoh 8y agoEvery step you take on the web, every site you visit, every page you view, is used to create and enhance a profile about you. Everything you do is carefully tracked and monitored. Bold of the author to openly admit this.
- peterkelly 8y agoHow is that bold? It's common knowledge.
- krapp 8y agoIt's bold of the author to admit that they are carefully tracking and monitoring everyone using this site to create and enhance profiles on them, particularly given the context of the article.
- rum3 8y agoThis particular site has no external trackers or analytics scripts.
- krapp 8y agoBut the claim made in the article is that "every step you take on the web, every site you visit, every page you view, is used to create and enhance a profile about you. Everything you do is carefully tracked and monitored." Obviously, if this is true, then it must be true for that site as well. Otherwise that assertion is just FUD and hyperbole, and it undermines the credibility of the argument being made about the scale of the evil of the modern web, and the necessity of a simpler, non-HTML based protocol to avoid those evils.
- rum3 8y agoAll traffic is monitored by the countless agencies around the world, the datacenters, the isps, spyware, malicious browser extensions, companies "helping" you by making a backup of your bookmarks and history, and so on, so it is definitely true for this site aswell.
- psim1 8y agoWhy not just serve static text over HTTP? At least then you'd have the ability to inline images. This--the use of Javascript and other technology for tracking purposes--isn't a problem for Gopher to solve. It's a problem for web content creators.
- okl 8y agoCorrect, here are some tips for content creators how a website can look like without all the bloat: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
- Ultramanoid 8y agoI have no idea how I could ever repay you for those precious links -- you made my night. ( Or how I haven't ever encountered those until now. )
- testplzignore 8y agoI was loving these until they said they were satire. Is it taboo to actually be serious about minimal design?
- okl 8y agosatire != comedy
- rdiddly 8y agoHadn't seen the last two. There's a slippery slope effect going on.
- runeb 8y agoReally, I feel like its showing 0.01% of the process that got us to where we are today.
- peatmoss 8y agoGopher is a really fun (and constrained) protocol. I’ve experimented a bit with interactive gopher servers in the past. A cool thing is that you can build a server in an afternoon starting with nothing more than your favorite programming language, some TCP server docs, and the wikipedia page. I’d love to see people build some gopher sites to do stupid and crazy things. Interactive fiction over gopher? Sure! SQL to gopher gateway with ascii viz? Awesome! Everyone should have a gopher hole... probably firewalled off of any production networks.
- chippy 8y agoThere is a public gopher proxy you can use e.g. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://box.matto.nl:70/0/revivegopher.txt http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://box.matto.nl:7...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- floatingatoll 8y agoOne tangent from this consideration would be: What would it take to make Content-Type: text/markdown a reality for web publishers?
- yati 8y agoTo start with, deciding what constitutes markdown, i.e., a spec. There are a bunch of incompatible "flavours" out there.
- vhakulinen 8y agohttps://commonmark.org/ https://commonmark.org/ is a good start.
- ohithereyou 8y agoThis hasn't hindered HTML.
- krapp 8y agoWhat would be the point? Markdown is a textual format intended to result in HTML anyway, and it includes the entirety of HTML already in its spec.
- tambourine_man 8y ago>Gopher is a much feature-less protocol than html HTML is not a protocol, that's HTTP.
- diminish 8y agoWe need a new mode for Fırefox an extremely restricted form of html5 without javascript, call it html0. <doctype html0> No JS, no thirparty content, only html5+, css3+, text, images, videos, audio and other stuff.
- okl 8y agoLike reading mode (F9) on certain websites? Doesn't show ads, so why should big business support it?
- diminish 8y agoExactly. It's time to develop a new independent web-zero with no sugar. Use a mode for Firefox and punish the cruft and bloat.
- ancarda 8y agoIt seems possible to achieve this today with Content-Security-Policy and Feature-Policy[1]. However, even without the help of those headers, one could also have some discipline (perhaps also respect for users) and refrain from putting tracking and other undesirable things onto their website. This doesn't seem to be a technical problem, so a technical solution - especially an opt-in one - probably won't help. [1] https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-feature-policy/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-feature-polic...
- Casseres 8y agoIf you have the ability to set the doctype of a page, don't you also already have the ability to not load thirdparty content?
- ZiiS 8y agoThe point is to allow the User Agent to display an icon meaning "This page says it dosnt need third party media so will be prevented from loading any"
- 8y ago
- fimdomeio 8y agoI was toying with an idea a while back of making sites just for non visual browsers. There was basically just a piece of css, blocking the visualization of content and letting users know this "this is a web 0.5 website. This site is best viewed in a terminal". The enforced rules where kind of a gentleman's (gentleperson) code of no css no js. Conclusions I got is that the thing had crazy fast loading (it even weird when you can no longer distinguish local for server), that it would be actually quite enjoyable coding experience has it's suddently is just 50% of the work and that the rendering of web pages in terminal browsers is actually really nice.
- pmlnr 8y agoIt called txt files. Good example: http://textfiles.com/magazines/LOD/lod-1 http://textfiles.com/magazines/LOD/lod-1
- TheRealPomax 8y agoAs someone who grew up with a 1200 baud modem and never used gopher: why would I start using gopher? What even is it? Can I use it to host webpages? It sounds like if "tracking is impossible" it probably can't use html+javascript? Why would I want to use that?
- welly 8y agoThere is no good reason to use gopher other than for nostalgic reasons.
- classichasclass 8y agoGopher menus are quick to parse and interact with even on very constrained systems, and the protocol is very simple. Given some of the other responses in this thread, I don't think those things are simply "nostalgia." I think you could argue that gopher has few practical uses, and while (as a Gopher user) I don't personally agree, I think the position is defensible depending on what your use cases are. But Gopher is a good example of how a minimal protocol can still offer services of some reasonable basic functionality, and I think that's worth something more than reminiscence.
- enneff 8y agoI love the Gopher protocol but there is no practical difference between a gopher service and a web server serving directory listings and files.
- classichasclass 8y agoYou're excluding gopher menus themselves, which can be customized and act as miniature documents, and search servers, which can take queries and offer basic interactivity.
- JdeBP 8y agoA gopher menu does not have to be a directory listing.
- brownbat 8y agoI've half seriously evangelized a few times here for a .text TLD. It wouldn't solve everything, but would make a nice playground that might be taken interesting places.
- DebtDeflation 8y agoI don't know if I necessarily want Gopher back, but I often dream of returning to the days when "the Internet" was primarily Usenet, IRC, Telnet, and email.
- teddyh 8y agoDon’t forget FTP. So much FTP.
- yoz-y 8y agoHow about reviving the “blogosphere” instead? Does it even need reviving? Most of the personal or tech blogs I visit do not have heavy ads or tracking on them, still offer full RSS articles and so on. People who care still have a lot of nice web sites to go to. Maybe what we need is a search engine that penalises JS and tracker use.
- vortico 8y agoFewer people read blogs. Why should more people write them?
- yoz-y 8y agoI have no proof but I have a hunch that although fewer people read blogs in comparison with Facebook and Twitter relatively speaking. More people read blogs than in the late 90’s and the 00’s in absolute numbers. I don’t think that social media has “stolen” many blog readers, rather the number of people on the web increased by helluvalot.
- astrobe_ 8y agoThat's the thing: Twitter and Facebook are nothing but least-effort blogs. Twitter in particular was touted as a "micro-blogging" platform.
- pmlnr 8y agoFor yourself. web log is a diary, an external memory, a memoir. The fact that you can share it to help others as well makes it a blog.
- vortico 8y agoThat is more often not the case than is.
- superkuh 8y agoThe web of the 90s is alive on tor. On tor the idea of running third party executable code in the age of spectre is (properly) seen as absurd. We just need to bring back webrings and we'll be set. Since it's on tor there's no need for evil centralization for DoS protection since it's baked into the protocol. Additionally your onion vanity name you brute forced cannot simply be taken away from you if there's political or social pressure on your registrar or above. No, we don't need gopher. We need people to stop running third party code like it's some normal thing. We need devs to stop making websites that don't render unless you run their code. It's really not that hard to run a hidden service. No harder than running a webserver. And everyone's home connections are fast enough now.
- bborud 8y agoMy memory is getting kind of blurry on this, but wasn't Gopher heading in a direction where someone wanted to extract licensing fees from it? I do remember discovering how WWW had made some leaps forward and promptly abandoning my project to write a Gopher+ server and instead turning what I was working on into an HTTP server. Sadly I never bothered publishing the code since interesting things were happening with the NCSA httpd code at the time (something which eventually turned into Apache)
- classichasclass 8y agoBack in the day, yes, UMN tried this and it probably did indeed kill the ecosystem. They backpedaled later but the damage was done. http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-software-licensing-policy.ancient http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-sof...
- lazyjones 8y agoThe article makes the incorrect assumption that tracking depends on HTML and/or JS/images. If we managed to revive Gopher, browser makes would soon build tracking into browsers and publishers would simply track on the server side like Cloudflare does already (https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/ https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/).
- akras14 8y agoWTF is gopher space? Asking for a friend.
- cortesoft 8y agoWhen they talk about “putting content on gopher”, what do they mean? Gopher is basically FTP with the ability to link to other sites. Other than text blogs or videos, what sort of content would we out on there?
- achillean 8y agoThere are around 281 Gopher servers active on the Internet at the moment: https://www.shodan.io/report/jhkXWTvL https://www.shodan.io/report/jhkXWTvL Will be interesting to see whether that number shifts in the near future.
- jamestomasino 8y agoFor those looking in the comments for places to explore in gopherspace, I would recommend starting here (use lynx): gopher://sdf.org # large community gopher://floodgap.com # a venerable gopher presence gopher://bitreich.org # small but very active community gopher://gopher.black/1/moku-pona # my phlog listing aggregator
- MentallyRetired 8y agoHow am I going to get my grandma to use gopher? Solve that, then you'll have my support.
- pbreit 8y agoI was wondering if Net News / NNTP / Usenet could address some of the distributed use cases people are trying to throw at blockchain?
- mrweasel 8y agoBlockchain wasn't really on my mind, but NNTP is something I think we should consider reviving. Reddit and Facebook has taken over the old forums and mailing lists, but I feel that those markets would be served equally well, or better by NNTP. The Reddit redesign makes it clear what direction they are moving in, and I fear that it will kill of all the interesting subreddits, where people have real discussions. In it's place will be an endless stream of memes, pictures and angry anti-Trump posts. All these subreddits will scatter and their uses left without a "home". The village I live in has a Facebook group, it's a closed group, so no browsing without a Facebook account. I'm relying on my wife to inform me, if anything interesting is posted. It's sad, because it's pretty much the only source you can turn to if it smells like the entire village is burning or the local power plant is making a funny sound. All the stuff that's to small for even local news, or is happing right now. Usenet would, in my mind, be a create place to host the communities currently on Facebook and Reddit. They will be safe from corporate control, or shifts in focus from they "hosting partner", and everyone will have equal and open access. Spam might be the unsolved problem, but I feel like that is something we can manage. I know that a Usenet comeback, with all the hope and dream I have for it, isn't coming. People don't like NNTP, they like Facebook.
- pbreit 8y agoAnyone know the easiest way to get a server up and running? I google “open source nntp “ with not great results.
- mtrower 8y agoDepending on your usecase, Leafnode might be reasonable. Personally, when I needed NNTP I sprung straight for INN, but be prepared to educate yourself. http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/ http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/ https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/ https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/
- oso2k 8y agoI always like to refer to Ian Hickson's Requirements for Replacing the Web [0] when this topic comes up. They seems to encapsulate well the social, technological and economic dynamics required when discussing replacing the Web. However, few attempts (Crockford's Seif Project [2], MS's Project Atlantis and Project Gazelle [2][3][4][5]) seemed have to heed this wisdom. [0] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8zGGJQ5VxwEJ:https://plus.google.com/%2BIanHickson/posts/SiLdNL9MsFw+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8zGGJQ... [1] http://seif.place/ http://seif.place/ [2] https://youtu.be/1uflg7LDmzI https://youtu.be/1uflg7LDmzI [3] https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/publications/atlantis-robust-extensible-execution-environments-forweb-applications https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/publications/atlantis-robus... [4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/gazelle.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... [5] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/browser-not-browser/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/browser-not-br...
- jancsika 8y ago> I always like to refer to Ian Hickson's Requirements for Replacing the Web [0] when this topic comes up. It's not that hard. Just iterate on any idea old that's even slightly more appealing to hack on than a full-blown browser. That includes... let's see... nearly anything! Then just be smart and dedicated about specifying the behavior of the new thing and figuring out workarounds for the awful parts. Ian Hickson did it[0]. [0] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8zGGJQ5VxwEJ:https://plus.google.com/%2BIanHickson/posts/SiLdNL9MsFw+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8zGGJQ...
- jboy55 8y agoI did a hackday project where I wrote a script that converted our intranet at work into a gopher site. Before I started, I was really enthused about it, but once I started, it just became evident how much a kludge these early protocols were. Its the COBOL of page description languages. Its truly horrible, its not like HTML was just this minor improvement, its a complete conceptual shift. GOPHER is just a tab delimitated file, so excel is the best editor for it. The first character is the type of thing, it can be a submenu (1), a text doc(0), a gif (g), an image (I), a binary file (b), a bin-hex file (4) or it can tell you the name of a mirror server so you can load balance?? (+). How do you take form input like a a street address? You can't, its one way data transfer.
- classichasclass 8y agoItem type 7 is how you handle queries, and how things like Veronica were implemented, so it's not one way. It's definitely constrained, but not impossible. There was also item type 2 for CSO, though that is much less common. Gopher+ had ASK forms which were much like HTML form controls but were, like much of Gopher+, complex to implement and not widely adopted. Some recent clients and servers support arguments over stdin like POST requests, but this too is not widely implemented.
- jboy55 8y agoMost of these tools like Archie and Veronica seemed like magical services when I started cruzing the internet. I recently learned that Archie when it started was nothing more than a collection of `ls -lR`s of various ftp servers that would be searched with grep. Which, in hindsite, was the obvious unixy way of doing it.
- rmellow 8y agoThe nature of this problem (that companies are able to track you) is not so much a technological problem, but an economical one. Even if gopher were the only alternative back then, it would have evolved just as HTML/HTTP did to support ads and tracking. All a content provider that doesn't want to serve ads and tracking has to do is not implement it. While content creators are still bound to whatever their publishing platform chooses to do (e.g. any content on Medium is subject to Medium's tracking practices), using an inferior technology is simply not a realistic solution. This is essentially a human issue, technology has little to do with it. You want to enable ad-free, tracking-free mass publishing? Provide a free publishing platform. The catch? Someone has to pay for it. You don't want to be tracked? Disable javascript. Some sites stopped working? Oh yeah, tracking you is how they pay the cost (nominal or economical) for serving you content. I would see merit however, in a search engine that allowed filtering for non-javascript friendly content.
- SkyMarshal 8y agoBlast from the past. If anyone wants to download NCSA Mosaic and load the author's gopher site with it, here ya go: https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic (binaries in Ubuntu's Snap Store, probably in other distros too) Find out more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
- rc-1140 8y agoOnce again, an internet user decides that in order to solve a social problem, we must move people to an ancient internet protocol for serving web pages rather than actually address the social problem by dealing with the real world entities performing the tracking.
- amiga-workbench 8y agoI'd rather have a conservative version of our current web standards, strip things back to a sensible subset of what we have now, possibly consider putting some kind of heavy rate-limiting or quotas on any client-side code that's ran. The web is no longer open if you need the funds and backing of a megacorp in order to implement a renderer that covers the whole standard.
- redwall_hp 8y agoLet's dial things back to before we entered the darkest timeline: the fork in the road where HTML5 happened instead of XHTML2 development being continued. A stricter, saner markup standard with less overhead to developing a rendering engine, and shitcan scripts as well.
- irth 8y ago> Gopher is not HTML Gopher can easily serve HTML content (and any other content type, too) I made a Gopher HackerNews proxy a few years ago, you can see it in action by running lynx gopher://hn.irth.pl and check out the source at https://github.com/irth/gophernews https://github.com/irth/gophernews
- kensai 8y agoIronically, I cannot go to the link he provides. Gopher: are not supported by Safari. :D
- z3t4 8y agoShould at least have a small guide on how to get started, like server software, client software, how to make a "page" ? You could block all ip-ranges for known trackers via firewall. And also disable JavaScript, cookies and media content. Or just surf the web using an old browser. Serious webmasters still make sure their web pages work in more then just Chrome.
- rum3 8y agoHow about not developing sites that break when JS is turned off? Why has it become a standard to make websites completely in JavaScript when it brings nothing positive to the table whatsoever? Who came up with this idiocy?
- jakeogh 8y agoDisable JS and this problem fixes itself.
- planktonite 8y agoI don’t understand how nobody else sees this. We need a new app layer protocol that has common features of the web baked in. Distributing apps over JS is insanity and it needs to stop. Having each webpage be it’s own app needs to stop. JS causes so many problems it makes me want to scream. If baked in simple text rendering, forum page rendering, video, image, sound and etc, you would cover what 99 percent of the internet is used for. Instead of each. Fucking. Website. Implementing all of these things independently in horrible, horrible JS, just bake it into the browser. No more JS nonsense, hacking, tracking, etc. this is such a simple and correct concept I don’t understand why it meets such massive resistance
- gcb0 8y ago> If you build it, they will come. People already built it. And not even talking about old gopher. Adblockers are that now. People who are technical enough see the benefit and swear by it. We just need to make it easier to use. Maybe an adblocker add-on with live support and constant monitoring (and tweaking of the rules) is a produt that you can sell by the millions? Canvas fingerprinting? gone. Third party cookies? gone. Auto play media? gone. etc. Everyone say that privacy is most expensive luxury nowadays. Maybe we need to commoditize it?
- akho 8y agoAd blocker with constant monitoring looks like a fun absurdist art project.
- ivan_ah 8y agoI remember during my undergrad days, my university (McGill) used to have its classified ads accessible via gopher. It was pretty popular and fairly easy to use. Surprisingly, there were quite a few non-technical people on there, e.g., posting apartments to sublet. This was in the days of Windows 2k/ME, so people had lower expectations for user interfaces back then.
- niftich 8y agoAs others are saying, HTML isn't the problem and Gopher isn't the solution: any bidirectional request-response protocol can be used to track clients, because there's a record of interactions the server can save. Client-side scripting as now commonly used on the Web increases the likelihood that some of these events occur despite the user's intent, but hosts can track and profile you by IP just fine, and if this hypothetical Gopher revival came to pass, it would also revive an interest in server-side ad serving and log mining that dynamic ads have long made obsolete. The two solutions are to: (a) not interact with hosts who track you -- which is hard to know ahead of time -- or (b) use a one-way broadcast protocol that leaves no ability for hosts to collect an interaction stream. And this exists too, from over-the-air television and radio, to teletext [1] and datacasting [2]. Compare the business models: unencrypted broadcast streams are full of ads too, but you don't get tracked. Or, the services are encrypted and the key exchange is moved out of band; you trade a bit of your privacy to establish an ongoing customer relationship to access gated content. Of course, broadcast on public airwaves is heavily regulated, and broadcast on unlicensed spectrum is sufficiently intertwined with and streamlined into wireless internet to be hidden in plain sight. Despite its technical merits, a broadcast 'renaissance' of sorts isn't likely to attract a discretionary audience without a real integrated commercial offering raising awareness -- amateur radio and tech demos don't have universal appeal, but a sleek device that accesses compelling first-party content in a privacy-preserving way might. But it's also a technical gamble when more proven solutions are less risky, and the kinds of players who deliver integrated offerings can deliver their service over IP with less fuss. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datacasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datacasting
- mortdeus 8y agowhy?
- wut42 8y agoPleroma, the alternative ActivityPub server to Mastodon, has a built in Gopher service. :)
- Animats 8y agoIf Github was still independent, a Gopher service for Github would make sense. Gopher is basically a file server, and Github is a file repository.
- Avamander 8y agoMy biggest issue with "gopher" is that I don't know how secure it is, how do I know the connection I'm using is secure and hasn't been intercepted, the current clients don't show that at all if it's even possible. I couldn't care less about tracking when the content isn't trustworthy.