Gopher or not.. there are BBSes, there are many ways just to stop doom scrolling, avoid surveillance economy as much as possible and live offline with a book (not a kindle device) on your knees. and yes.. most of the ADHD generation with depressions, self-identification problems that we see today is exactly because tech made them this way.. or social media most of all.
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.
pmlnr
WhatsApp has little to do with doomscrolling. I really wish I could afford to not use it, but it seems to be impossible.
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.
rcxdude
I think the algorithmic feeds and attention economy are pretty corrosive, but going retro is only one way to resolve that issue. Primarily, I think it's better to find a smaller community that you can feel connected to, and this is a general trend but someone that's relatively invisible by its own nature. Whether this is a whatsapp group chat, a small discord server, an IRC chatroom, gopher, webrings and email, or just meeting people face-to-face doesn't matter so much (at least as far as mental health effects go: YMMV on other issues like privacy/censorship/etc as well as who else is using the protocol/platform).
wtch98
> 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
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
Vaushite
Zuck analyses every message you send and the metadata of your contacts, and sells the analysis results to advertisers and government agencies. That's how.
syshyk
Whatsapp begs and pleads for your contacts list permission.
Even if you aren't a user, almost certainly someone who has your number is. :(
Vaushite
You have to give it permission so you can contact anyone. It only supports your contacts list.
letrix
And why would they pay for it? I can't see the ads anywhere.
wtch98
It's worth something, but surely nowhere near enough to justify the $19b purchase 12 years ago, which if extended in line with meta's share price would mean it would be worth about $200b today
hollowonepl
considering people today are messaging (typing in) more in whatsapp than in facebook as the latter is infested by AI content and dead internet theory more than ever.. well. I'd add to whatsapp valuation in their evil empire. I'd not be surprised it should be more valued by Zuck today than FB + Insta together as prospect for the future.. only to die as every online communicator eventually dies... call it ICQ, Skype or whatever...
hollowonepl
Man, <Eternal September> this is so true. I totally forgot that term until you brought it back to my memory. I miss times when only universities and enlightened people had access to online discussions, not the average folk who just quack.
alexfortin
I tend to agree, actually I recently blogged[0] about something related but more in general I think it's totally doable to have a sane and very enjoyable digital life today too, perhaps even more than in the past, but it takes effort, of course, like everything valuable in life usually does.
I absolutely agree too.. also on the extra effort factor to get it.
agumonkey
I do agree that spending time outside of the current internet field of distortion is quite pleasurable. I'm still dumbfounded how we pivoted from an ok-old-world with a bit of cyberspace fun to dopamine altering doomscrolling.
heavensteeth
> most of the ADHD generation with depressions, self-identification problems that we see today is exactly because tech made them this way..
Are you suggesting ADHD is something you can "get"?
wincy
I tell you what, I’m diagnosed with severe ADHD, but when I go into the woods for a multi day hike I have zero difficulty being laser focused on every task I’m doing.
rcxdude
There is an extent to which being in a simpler environment can help a lot, because there's much less stuff that you could focus on and a much more immediate sense of the importance of those tasks.
(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)
hoppp
It's because ADHD is a natural human condition, but the modern world is not accomodating. It has a very important place in human history and humans owe a lot to people with ADHD. We would be not here without ADHD today.
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.
graemep
Are you saying it is not?
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.
rcxdude
The disorder/difference thing is very much a matter of degree and context. Most disorders are essentially an extreme version of a 'normal' variation in some trait. ADHD among them. Psychiatrists define disorders when that variation is extreme enough to cause problems for the individual or those around them, but still there is a wide range of degrees between e.g. "struggling to get into work sometimes" and "literally can't hold down a job".
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.
andsoitis
> there is disagreement over whether it is a difference or a deficiency,
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?
graemep
Is the deficiency in them or society?
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?
wincy
The thing is it’s likely an evolutionary adaptation of being overturned for… something. I suspect hunting. Hearing a twig crack, being hyper focused and not being able to get something out of your head. Tracking your prey for hours, these would be useful in a low stimulation environment like say, the woods of Europe 20,000 years ago. It’s certainly a deficiency in most modern humans as we aren’t out chasing down prey, but that doesn’t mean it was never a useful trait.
andsoitis
> It’s certainly a deficiency in most modern humans as we aren’t out chasing down prey, but that doesn’t mean it was never a useful trait.
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.
hoppp
I think if your working memory is emptied more often you are more likely to spot a predator, like the doorway effect but happens even when staying put.
graemep
Its probably useful for many tasks that require intense concentration.
Being good in emergencies is not a trait you need often, but very valuable when you do need it.
hoppp
One theory, based on neurodivergence in chimps, is the difference in attention and sensory processing evolved because they are able to spot a predator much faster. They stay on the outskirts of society and warn the others.
I think of it like the doorway effect, the working memory is dumped more often to have more resources for processing sudden events.
hollowonepl
when I think about ADHD as modern civilisational disease, I can't find better reference than Johny Mnemonic and that lady who needed jabs from a black doc because she could not handle emotions not keep her hand without shaking and they explained it very well.. "nobody understands it.. but it came with the moment we stopped being able to consume all the information that was bombarding us" sort of as quasi quotation (I don't really remember it word by word, but I do believe that was the explanation)
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.
hollowonepl
Yes, world we live in not helping to avoid its pitfalls, even if you were born with it. not saying it's 100% 'gotten' thanks to times we live in, but surely exposed beyond personal management to many... thanks to times we live in.
_heimdall
Are you proposing that its entirely genetic with no environmental factors?
rcxdude
The traits themselves (tested in isolation), seem to be primarily genetic, yes. Whether it's enough to be a disorder or not may depend on the environment you find yourself in day to day.
_heimdall
I'd be very interested if you have sources or research you could recommend.
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.
pasquinelli
i'm curious, when you say the traits seem to be grnetic, how is it that they seem that way?
rcxdude
Here's a video that covers it, though not in great detail (and a little dated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHVbx293eCs&list=PLzBixSjmbc... (this guy had a whole youtube channel on ADHD but it seems to have been hacked and deleted recently, which is a great shame. He's also talked about how in his experience a lot of the parents of kids he's treating also have ADHD, and how that can make things even worse if not addressed).
kilpikaarna
They’re strongly heritable, for one…
_heimdall
Are you saying we often see ADHD show up in multiple generations of a family?
That doesn't necessarily mean its genetic, families often have similar environmental conditions as well.
rcxdude
Yes. There's a reports from psychiatrists that specialise in ADHD that one of the problems that can arise is one or both of the parents having ( often undiagnosed) ADHD, something which can make parenting in general a struggle even if the child doesn't have it.
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).
_heimdall
Twins are always an interesting case, that could go against environmental conditions.
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.
rcxdude
For a random person I might not, but for someone who is specialised in ADHD and working closely with the parents I would rate it a lot higher, given those are the conditions for making a reliable diagnosis (and IIRC he then focuses on getting them formally diagnosed and treated as well).
hoppp
Highly genetic and was beneficial for early human explorers. It might have driven the exploration to leave Africa, which was a theory since the 90's
We are so many steps deeper in. It is now a (payed) privilege of you have the affordance to not be totally connected and the other stuff you mentioned. Currently in a place that is very sobering in that sense.
hollowonepl
that's something very key about how you found out that it had to be paid first to afford what is the most expensive currency in the world -> time. People not always realise that until it's too late that we're not fighting to get more dollah... but more time when you have enough dollah so you can show all that consumerism and wanna-be-life-celebrity attitude a proper middle finger!
hoppp
ADHD is not because social media, it's as ancient as humanity.
ADHD is genetic and heritable. Do not confuse natural selected features with the effects of modern technology.
okeuro49
Kindles are great
andrewstuart
And yet here you are on HN.
hollowonepl
true. but since 2012 or so with almost no karma thanks to little activity. so I'd say I respect HN for it's self-curated discipline to consume something that often Reddit and other places long lost. Don't screw it up people! :)
prologic
I still think Gopher (the protocol that is) is still very relevant today. The beauty of it really is in its simplicity. Great to see that the library I wrote all those years ago is still being used :D
I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.
marttt
I've become stuck in a strange metaphor regarding this: Gopher, Gemini etc are like an indicator of "biodiversity". Like a species living happily inside a small, even tiny ecological niche, having discovered that they don't really need much more.
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.
grumbel
That's one big issue, but I feel like the even bigger one is that neither of them fixes what's wrong with HTTP: Publishing is not a first-class citizen on the net.
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.
vaylian
What about https://neocities.org/? It's fairly straightforward and gives you the full power of HTML and a free subdomain.
I think the barrier is much more a matter of awareness of how web sites can be created than actual technical limitations.
grumbel
Neocities is just a repeat of Geocities, and like everything else on the Web, it depend s on a third party to keep the service running, and whenever they lose interesting, all the content is lost. Even when somebody archives it, all the links are broken and the content becomes nearly impossible to find.
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.
goodmythical
>it depend s on a third party to keep the service running
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.
grumbel
> Does Nostr address this? Even things like freenet, tor, i2p rely on third parties...
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.
NoboruWataya
I usually check in on gemini://antenna.michaelnordmeyer.com/ and think the content is a bit broader than you suggest. Recent posts cover topics like OpenBSD, Disney movies, Arch Linux, UK local radio, socks, books, and so on. Yes, there are a number of posts about Gemini, too, but it's a minority.
post-it
I feel the same about Gander (the Canadian Bluesky-compatible startup). The only content on it is people talking about how it's not Twitter. One of my top three beefs with it.
Vaushite
I think these projects focus way too much on platform building than content acquisition. The valuable platform is the one where the content is, whether that's celebrity feeds or professional networking. It doesn't matter how technically good your platform is if there's no casual reason to visit.
vconnor
The early years of BlueSky were people talking about how it’s not Twitter.
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.
anthk
gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.
abc123abc123
What are you missing? Just write a bot that pulls interesting content into gopher, and start filling it. Since the protocol is so easy, nothing could be easier.
II2II
I am not looking for particular content, just for something that is interesting to read. Typically, that falls into the realm of things that people are passionate about. It may be a project. It may be an issue. It may be something they research in their spare time. It may be silly, or it may be serious.
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.
warkdarrior
Maybe they are passionate about themselves??
hujun236
The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?
rektlessness
Proud exSDF member from the old days.
SDF was considered 'vintage' back when i joined so must be doubly so now.
Was introduced to Gopher back then too, along with NetBSD.
What a blast from the past to see SDF.org make it to HN in 2026.
Proud grandpa. lol.
rustyhancock
Why exSDF member? Your account is surely still there waiting for you!
rektlessness
I didn't keep up with my MetaARPA membership dues. Account is probably suspended by now, or deleted.
rustyhancock
I think your membership would have fallen back to ARPA level which never expires.
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].
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.
ecliptik
Few months ago I had Claude build me a Gopher browser for Classic Macintosh systems, geomys[1]. I was using TurboGopher[2] before then, and it worked, but had a lot of design choices that are clunky today.
I tried to focus on keeping with the Apple HIG from the 1990s, while also making it more aligned with modern browser principles.
SDF is wonderful. Been supporting them for around 20 years.
Kwpolska
I'm not sure what's Gopher-specific in this article. While HTTP is more complicated and more capable, it is still something a human can understand, and it is still possible to make a HTTP request using nothing but netcat.
alexfortin
This got me thinking that I already have all my posts in my ATproto PDS anyway, so why not to serve them as a Gopher hole too?
Very much alpha quality, but it's already working relatively well with e.g. lynx
spiriteater
Social media is an inherent competition for attention. The same is true of all the algo-based systems, including search engines. What you want may be a time before we let everyone and their dog stake a claim, have a startup, and shill products on the open internet. Maybe instead we need a new internet with some kind of test to use it.
Gemini is essentially GopherS, Reticulum doesn't seem to operate at the same level (it is L3, like IP, from the look of it).
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.
Panda_
RNS doesn't really map to the OSI model very well. It takes up basically every layer, 2-6, although it does depend on how it's used. The image on https://linuxinabit.codeberg.page/blog/reticulum/ quite near the top explains the difference between Reticulum and, as an example, TCP fairly well.
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.
anthk
Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less,
do yourself a favour. Run
unset LESSOPEN
or have it at ~/.profile.
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
For gemini,
gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.
'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.
You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
stargate.gemi.dev:1994
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.
For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.
billyhoffman
I run gemi.dev, so it was nice to see it here.
I recently built a Gemini client for people who like GUI's more than TUI's, and want a native macOS app
Now if someone did for Go what they did for rettui...
vconnor
Time to stop posting about these, there’s no rush for them to have their Eternal September moment. Let us enjoy the good vibes for a while longer.
vaylian
What would an eternal September look like for Gemini? I don't think it's possible, because it's a protocol for putting basic documents online.
vaylian
What is a good starting point for getting more experience with actually using Gopher/Gemini?
azatom
tldr I despise fakirs who misunderstand "the path to good things may involve suffering" as "if you suffer, you'll get good things". There is no reason for monospace with fixed wrapping.
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"...
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.
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.
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. :(
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015169
Are you suggesting ADHD is something you can "get"?
(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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10878810
https://pkg.go.dev/git.mills.io/prologic/go-gopher
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.
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.
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].
0 - https://sdf.org/?join
1 - https://sdf.org/?faq?BASICS?12
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.
1. https://github.com/ecliptik/geomys
2. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/265-turbogopher
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
- https://reticulum.network
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.
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:
For gemini, 'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.
Just set
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.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
https://github.com/acidus99/MajorTom
There are also a few variants of Rust ports too (i like https://github.com/zevaryx/rettui for a full nomadnet replacement)
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.