Gopher
With lots of discussions about big tech, privacy and data protection there has been discussions on the Social Web, about using protocols such as Gopher and related software.
We are also seeing attacks on science from the USA with departments cut, and information on a range of issues; such as DEI, Climate Science, Medical Science being removed, risking this being lost forever.
The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. [1]
There are still some servers out there, some are new, and offer services such as HackerNews, Project Gutenberg and others. Thanks to Anthk @anthk@paquita.masto.host who has made a list of some of these Gopher servers
Does the web allow you to do this at 2.7 KBPS?
- Gutenberg gopher://gopher.icu/7/gutenberg
- Internet Archive gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/
- Huge portal gopher://magical.fish
- News, blog and more gopher://1436.ninja
- Reddit gopher://gopherddit.com
- HN gopher://hngopher.com
- Google Maps (text) gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/dir
- Podcasts: gopher://gopher.icu/1/pod
Blogs:
- gopher://sdf.org
- Weather (finger):
- gopher://graph.no:79/0/London
There are still clients software out there, and yeah you can all this with good old plain text.
apt search gopher
Links
- Wikipedia – Gopher Protocol
DIY Gopher Server
Note the tutorial above on how to set up gopher on a Raspberry Pi, appears to be using system V, (init.d system I think) hence I have included the 3rd link which covers how to manage services on both. The 2nd link should help with setting up the actual gopher files.
I tried to install the software mentioned in the first link above and there seems to be a problem with this in my raspberry pi, so I removed this and have installed gophernicus instead.
22/4/2025
If all else fails then vern.cc members get gopher as one of the services. So I will look at a hosted service.
21/4/2025
Had issues with gophernicus as I am not sure where the config file is.
Tags
#Internet,#Communication.#Protocol,#Gopher,#Software,
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