Read a post by Daniel Goldsmith (View from ASCRAEUS)

I’ve been happily noodling around the interstices of the web of late.

I’m still super happy with my nanoreader and using it everyday has reminded me of the beauty of plaintext. Text is content.

In that spirit, I’ve gone back to using gopher. I’ve finally got what I missed when I wrote about this three years ago - text doesn’t need to be the web! Text can just be itself, text should just be itself. My previous effort missed this fundamental principle, and looking back now, I can see that this was largely to blame for my walking away from that experiment.

Coming back to the idea of gopher, with that in mind, has been liberating.

Some of my content (not my microposts) is available on gopher, as this post will be. I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, feeling my way into an area I once knew well, and I’m satisfied with the results.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who’s using gopher, or who’s using older text-focused network systems in interesting ways. I still want to love the web. I still want to find communities working to deliver on the promise there once was in this technology.

I seem to be seeing a lot of resurgence around Gopher in the past couple of months…