Why Gopher in 2026?

Posted by andsoitis 15 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by hollowonepl 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by rcxdude 1 hour ago

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).

Comment by heavensteeth 4 hours ago

> 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"?

Comment by wincy 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by rcxdude 2 hours ago

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)

Comment by graemep 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by rcxdude 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by andsoitis 2 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by wincy 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by andsoitis 2 hours 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.

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.

Comment by _heimdall 2 hours ago

Are you proposing that its entirely genetic with no environmental factors?

Comment by rcxdude 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by _heimdall 45 minutes ago

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.

Comment by pasquinelli 1 hour ago

i'm curious, when you say the traits seem to be grnetic, how is it that they seem that way?

Comment by rcxdude 16 minutes ago

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).

Comment by alexfortin 5 hours ago

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015169

Comment by agumonkey 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by okeuro49 48 minutes ago

Kindles are great

Comment by thenthenthen 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by wtch98 4 hours ago

> 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

Comment by Vaushite 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by andrewstuart 45 minutes ago

And yet here you are on HN.

Comment by prologic 14 hours ago

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

https://pkg.go.dev/git.mills.io/prologic/go-gopher

Comment by II2II 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by marttt 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by NoboruWataya 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by grumbel 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by vaylian 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by grumbel 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by goodmythical 56 minutes ago

>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.

Comment by grumbel 21 minutes ago

> 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.

Comment by abc123abc123 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by II2II 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by post-it 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by Vaushite 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by vconnor 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by anthk 12 hours ago

gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.

Comment by warkdarrior 13 hours ago

Maybe they are passionate about themselves??

Comment by hujun236 12 hours ago

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?

Comment by rektlessness 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by rustyhancock 7 hours ago

Why exSDF member? Your account is surely still there waiting for you!

Comment by ecliptik 11 hours ago

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.

1. https://github.com/ecliptik/geomys

2. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/265-turbogopher

Comment by ottoflux 9 hours ago

SDF is wonderful. Been supporting them for around 20 years.

Comment by vaylian 2 hours ago

What is a good starting point for getting more experience with actually using Gopher/Gemini?

Comment by Kwpolska 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by vaporup 14 hours ago

- https://geminiprotocol.net

- https://reticulum.network

Comment by vconnor 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by vaylian 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by anthk 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by nullwarp 11 minutes ago

There is a go port of reticulum which I've used with success https://github.com/Quad4-Software/Reticulum-Go

There are also a few variants of Rust ports too (i like https://github.com/zevaryx/rettui for a full nomadnet replacement)

Comment by billyhoffman 11 hours ago

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

https://github.com/acidus99/MajorTom

Comment by hugodan 6 hours ago

i would love it to have support for images, but maybe i'm missing the point i guess

Comment by azatom 4 hours ago

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"...

Comment by vaylian 2 hours ago

HTML and CSS describe how a document should look like. Afaik with Gemini/Gopher it is entirely up to the client how it should be rendered.

Comment by jmclnx 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by cowlevel 13 hours ago

Same applies to HTTP too though

Comment by quimawen 7 hours ago

This is a useful angle on Go. I'd want to see how it holds outside the initial conditions.