7 ms·

Wonderful, pure creativity and determination at work here. It's so cool to see what wild ideas people will follow through with. A gemini client would be a cool

Wonderful, pure creativity and determination at work here. It's so cool to see what wild ideas people will follow through with. A gemini client would be a cool next step for this: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

spicybright 5y ago
I think gopher would be better, just by how much content is available on it and how stupid simple it is. But either option would be really flipping cool to see!
- makeworld 5y ago
  Gemini actually has more domains than Gopher these days, from the statistics I've seen. Maybe not more content, due to Gopher's history, it's hard to say.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  I think Gopher would be ideal here, based on screensize and the CPU capability.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  How would I go about finding/discovering gopher content? That sounds like fun!
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Oh man, you're in for a treat today :) So, while gopher works like any website (you can host your own server for people to visit), the main hub of the "gophersphere" is floodgap. It's run by someone who runs spiders to index sites, and maintains an html gopher proxy, so you can browse gopher sites from your browser. https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite So starting there will let you branch off to whatever you find interesting! If you dig enough, there's content you won't find anywhere on the modern web too, especially from really old sites that are still being hosted from back in the heyday. The further you go, the more old stuff you'll find. It feels like exploring ancient ruins that have been long abandoned. What's unique about Gopher (at least to me,) is it goes a bit beyond just hosting content like how we see the modern web. There's a lot of history and culture around it. The protocol itself is extremely interesting to dig into. It's simple enough you can use telnet or curl to browse (clunkily of course), but there were many attempts to extend it in crazy ways. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR How it started and became popular is very cool to look into as well. Currently, the main content creators on gopher share a deep "counter-culture" attitude towards the modern web. You'll almost never find an ad, or junky blog posts that are nothing but fluff. No popups, no politics (like the EU banner thing), or even seeing a webpage being rendered as it loads. It's all so simple the only thing you can host is pure content and links. And users/content creators take a lot of pride in that fact. Anyways, apologies for the ramble. It's just a big passion of mine. Good luck on your first dive :)
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      What are these Gopher proxies of which you speak? Still works fine for me on Mosaic 3.0... https://archive.org/download/mosaic-ncsa-evolt_browsers/windows/3.0/32bit/mos30.exe https://archive.org/download/mosaic-ncsa-evolt_browsers/wind...
    - icelancer 5y ago
      Click the first link and.... "Malicious Activity Detected You appear to be using software associated with or exhibiting bot-like activity. This is banned for security reasons. If this is a legitimate access, please E-mail gopher@floodgap.com with an explanation. httpi/1.7.2 (nano_inetd_turbo/AIX) by Cameron Kaiser" Well, never mind.
      - classichasclass 5y ago
        Please do send me the explanation. The proxy gets a lot of crap from bad bots (which in turn can make it burdensome on downstream sites) which requires controls, but the heuristics are just that, heuristic. If there's something to whitelist, I will.
        electroly 5y ago
        FWIW, I got exactly the same message, and all I did was click the floodgap.com link in spicybright's post. Floodgap.com has never seen another request from me so I don't know what it could be detecting. I'm just using Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
      - 6510 5y ago
        https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?=hngopher.com+70+312f6c6976652f6974656d732f3239353830373236 https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?=hngopher.com+70+...
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Agreed. And a simple NFS V2 client so that you could load cartridge images from a NAS device would be fun as well.
aloknnikhil 5y ago
Genuinely curious, why is the next step creating a Gemini client?

spicybright 5y ago

I think gopher would be better, just by how much content is available on it and how stupid simple it is. But either option would be really flipping cool to see!

makeworld 5y ago
Gemini actually has more domains than Gopher these days, from the statistics I've seen. Maybe not more content, due to Gopher's history, it's hard to say.
classichasclass 5y ago
I think Gopher would be ideal here, based on screensize and the CPU capability.
jedimastert 5y ago
How would I go about finding/discovering gopher content? That sounds like fun!
- spicybright 5y ago
  Oh man, you're in for a treat today :) So, while gopher works like any website (you can host your own server for people to visit), the main hub of the "gophersphere" is floodgap. It's run by someone who runs spiders to index sites, and maintains an html gopher proxy, so you can browse gopher sites from your browser. https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite So starting there will let you branch off to whatever you find interesting! If you dig enough, there's content you won't find anywhere on the modern web too, especially from really old sites that are still being hosted from back in the heyday. The further you go, the more old stuff you'll find. It feels like exploring ancient ruins that have been long abandoned. What's unique about Gopher (at least to me,) is it goes a bit beyond just hosting content like how we see the modern web. There's a lot of history and culture around it. The protocol itself is extremely interesting to dig into. It's simple enough you can use telnet or curl to browse (clunkily of course), but there were many attempts to extend it in crazy ways. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR How it started and became popular is very cool to look into as well. Currently, the main content creators on gopher share a deep "counter-culture" attitude towards the modern web. You'll almost never find an ad, or junky blog posts that are nothing but fluff. No popups, no politics (like the EU banner thing), or even seeing a webpage being rendered as it loads. It's all so simple the only thing you can host is pure content and links. And users/content creators take a lot of pride in that fact. Anyways, apologies for the ramble. It's just a big passion of mine. Good luck on your first dive :)
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    What are these Gopher proxies of which you speak? Still works fine for me on Mosaic 3.0... https://archive.org/download/mosaic-ncsa-evolt_browsers/windows/3.0/32bit/mos30.exe https://archive.org/download/mosaic-ncsa-evolt_browsers/wind...
  - icelancer 5y ago
    Click the first link and.... "Malicious Activity Detected You appear to be using software associated with or exhibiting bot-like activity. This is banned for security reasons. If this is a legitimate access, please E-mail gopher@floodgap.com with an explanation. httpi/1.7.2 (nano_inetd_turbo/AIX) by Cameron Kaiser" Well, never mind.
    - classichasclass 5y ago
      Please do send me the explanation. The proxy gets a lot of crap from bad bots (which in turn can make it burdensome on downstream sites) which requires controls, but the heuristics are just that, heuristic. If there's something to whitelist, I will.
      - electroly 5y ago
        FWIW, I got exactly the same message, and all I did was click the floodgap.com link in spicybright's post. Floodgap.com has never seen another request from me so I don't know what it could be detecting. I'm just using Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
    - 6510 5y ago
      https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?=hngopher.com+70+312f6c6976652f6974656d732f3239353830373236 https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?=hngopher.com+70+...

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Agreed. And a simple NFS V2 client so that you could load cartridge images from a NAS device would be fun as well.

aloknnikhil 5y ago

Genuinely curious, why is the next step creating a Gemini client?