Gopher
My Gopher Hole
Quite some time ago I delved into the realm of Gopher - the internet protocol that pre-dated WWW and that quickly became extinct thereafter.
Gopher is a simple protocol and mostly serves simple text files, but can "deliver" other types of files (images, sound etc). What it doesn't do is allow formatting within a text file, it's just plain text, no markup, no "rendering" and significantly no inline images and no embedded hyperlinks.
You can have a menu (aka gophermap) that has selectors - links to other resources which can be local to this gopher server or remote on another gopher server. It all looks like one distributed filesystem.
There's been a resurgence of interest in "small-web" protocols lately - simple HTML-only personal websites, simple self-hosted blogs (like this one) and alternative protocols like Gopher and the newer Gemini.
Gopher space is different to the Web. And there are people who only post/publish on Gopher. There are people who publish on Gopher and the web simultaneously and others that choose the platform for a post depending on its content.
I toyed a while ago about ditching all my WWW sites - blog, dokuwiki, webpages (such as they are) - and only put things on Gopher, to keep away from the nasty WWW.
Yes, the WWW is now a largely user-hostile environment. Awash with advertising and tracking and search engines that spy and only provide search results that are designed to lead to commercial sites, and to put adverts infront of your eyeballs... and AI....
But, I also find that, for example, in the Ham Radio niche that there are still personal websites containing people's ideas, experiments, projects, shared knowledge and experience. No AI, no monetization. Just good old personal "small-web" websites. They DO still exist... but it takes effort to find them
We need to curate our own list of sites we're interested in. And follow breadcrumb trails from site to site - bookmarking them manually as we go - and avoid AI-riddled search engines. Pretend it's pre-G*^gle days. When search engines were cr&p and you had to use your intuition and follow your own path through cyberspace, mapping it as you went.
And Gopher is still a valuable part, I think, of the experience for me. I can write stuff there that will only be found and read by real people who are themselves travelling in Gopherspace, mapping it and remembering which Gopherholes they enjoy, and want to keep visiting.
I will post things in both places - here on a Blog if it's radio-related and especially if it requires pictures to really convey the content - and on Gopher if it's words-only. I may post some things in both places.
My Gopherhole:
