USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age
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Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It's like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene.
And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the
.projector.planfile on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically "ye olde status update".There's a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.
the .plan file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered
Heh.
Permanently Deleted
Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary. The University of Minnesota owned the code and proposed to charge server owners for using it. Meanwhile Sir Tim over at CERN was handing out the original
httpdunder an MIT-style license.There was some early work supporting things like forms and search on Gopher. But it was pretty much abandoned as soon as WWW started catching on.
University of Minnesota, my dude...software named for their mascot.
super interesting!
Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary
That may be so but gopher was never any fun in comparison to www
Oh, it was - before we had the WWW. I remember the day when a co-student told me to have a look at this new web thingy, "like gopher, but with hypertext!".
that is interesting! I used to use gopher in the 80's and while it was fine for 'read the FAQ at this address' it was awful for discovery and navigation in the pre mouse era was a real chore. When http came out we couldn't get enough. There was a coffee machine that was online and it was so wild to check in on this coffee machine in some college real time. Gopher was fine it definitely wasn't fun and rarely was it very interesting. The web was interesting from the get go.
[Gemini] has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
"Markup" would be a better term here. Markdown is a specific markup language which Gemini doesn't use.
See this? These are the comments I live for. You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/)...
That's neat! Thanks!
Funnily enough I was toying with the idea of making a Gopher based Lemmy frontend for the lulz. Maybe Gemini then?
What's the cool thing to do there?
One cool thing is the game astrobotany, but Gemini shines in its focus on connecting through text only medium. Try midnight city for that.
(If you can't find URLs, ping me and I'll update the post)
Wow thanks for this comment, Lagrange works incredibly well. I had a lot of fun trying out Gemini, I had been doing Gopher recently but Im definitely going to add this to my goofing around.
Uh, no, Gemini is not like Gopher. Gopher wants to share files. Gemini wants to be a more simple internet.