We must revive Gopherspace

Last edited Thu Dec 28 15:54:13 2017

Both the world of html and the world of Gopher orginate from the same era. The world wide web of html has become huge. Gopherspace not.

The web has changed

Although the world wide web is a huge success, it also has turned into an area of great concern. 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.

Surveillance marketing is evil.

Google, who once started with the core value of "do no evil" has become one of the most privacy invading organisations, just like Facebook and some others.

Webpages once started as just text, and later got also images. Today, a webpage consists of a number of javascript files. a lot of links to surveillance marketeers, links to Facebook Twitter, Google, Instagram and so on, and than some content in a html file.

Many websites and many webpages do not exist to give you information, but to sell you advertisements, to lure you to commerial webpages or to sell your private information to a surveillance marketing to build your profile.

Gopherspace is not evil

Maybe Gopher's weakness proves the be its biggest strength.

Gopher is a much feature-less protocol than html. This is probably why it lost the race from html. But this not only makes Gopher flying fast, it also protects you from all those evil properties of the world wide web. Trackers have no change in Gopherspace.

Surveillance marketing can not thrive in Gopherspace.

We must revive Gopherspace

Everybody has given op on Gopher. Hardly any browser supports it any more. There are just a few Gopher servers left.

In order to make a comeback, Gopherspace needs two things:

People visiting Gopherspace

Contemporary content

We need more people using Gopher. So, spread the word. Start using it yourself. Ask creators of webbrowsers to revive their support of Gopher. Or create a plugin.

If you build it, they will come.

Most of the content on Gopherspace is outdated. Often it is kept alive out of nostalgia. This is great, but not if there are no gopher sources that provide contemporary content.

This is where the technically less challanged folks come in. This is what you can do.

You can set up a gopher server. It is not that hard.

You can add content to Gopherspace.

Got a blog? Got a website? Put a Gopher server along side of it, and share content on both platforms.

I have already started