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Your "rising interest in Gopher (the protocol)" is a handful of enthusiasts. Maybe if you tried really hard, you could identify two dozen of them. There are ove

Your "rising interest in Gopher (the protocol)" is a handful of enthusiasts. Maybe if you tried really hard, you could identify two dozen of them. There are over half a million Go programmers in the world.

jolmg 7y ago
I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream should just die. It takes effort to be outside the mainstream. It makes it worse that the reason is simply because a monopoly-sponsored language wanted to use the name for a mascot for their language. Of course a language sponsored by Google is going to be popular. As the most powerful marketing company in the world, they have the power to rub whatever they want on all our faces. Linux was only for handfuls of enthusiasts. The *BSDs were for a handful of enthusiasts. Plan9 is still only for a handful of enthusiasts. I guess they/we should all just disappear or submit to just using Chrome on Windows and programming everything as webapps in Javascript, right? I'm not really a user of Gopher, but I appreciate anything that helps alleviate the insane Internet monoculture that we have right now, where the Internet is becoming synonymous with the Web and where it's very likely if not done already that world laws will be written with only the Web in mind.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  > I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream should just die. I'm not being normative i.e. trying to persuade you that Gopher _should_ die, in my opinion. I'm being descriptive i.e. describing the world in which we live where Gopher _is_ dead.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other package. Right now, Gopher clients are in official repositories. All I need to install one is: sudo pacman -S elinks and all I need to visit one is: elinks gopher://gopher.meulie.net
    - sagichmal 7y ago
      > Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other package. This is an impractical definition of "dead".

jolmg 7y ago

I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream should just die. It takes effort to be outside the mainstream. It makes it worse that the reason is simply because a monopoly-sponsored language wanted to use the name for a mascot for their language. Of course a language sponsored by Google is going to be popular. As the most powerful marketing company in the world, they have the power to rub whatever they want on all our faces. Linux was only for handfuls of enthusiasts. The *BSDs were for a handful of enthusiasts. Plan9 is still only for a handful of enthusiasts. I guess they/we should all just disappear or submit to just using Chrome on Windows and programming everything as webapps in Javascript, right? I'm not really a user of Gopher, but I appreciate anything that helps alleviate the insane Internet monoculture that we have right now, where the Internet is becoming synonymous with the Web and where it's very likely if not done already that world laws will be written with only the Web in mind.

sagichmal 7y ago
> I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream should just die. I'm not being normative i.e. trying to persuade you that Gopher _should_ die, in my opinion. I'm being descriptive i.e. describing the world in which we live where Gopher _is_ dead.
- jolmg 7y ago
  Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other package. Right now, Gopher clients are in official repositories. All I need to install one is: sudo pacman -S elinks and all I need to visit one is: elinks gopher://gopher.meulie.net
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    > Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other package. This is an impractical definition of "dead".