Why Gopher in 2026?
gopher.muffinlabs.comGopher 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they are passionate about themselves??
gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.
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?
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.
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.
Why exSDF member? Your account is surely still there waiting for you!
SDF is wonderful. Been supporting them for around 20 years.
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.
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
or have it at ~/.profile.unset LESSOPENReticulum 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,gopher://magical.fish gopher://sdf.org
'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.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.stargate.gemi.dev:1994For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.
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
i would love it to have support for images, but maybe i'm missing the point i guess
Why ? It is not owned and controlled by billionaires. Plus no AI slop being spammed to gopher sites.
FWIW, the same applies to gemini protocol.
Same applies to HTTP too though
This is a useful angle on Go. I'd want to see how it holds outside the initial conditions.