Gopher (and other alternative net protocols)

Since the web is being attacked from all sides, with even the W3C supporting DRM, let's find solace in the forgotten protocols of the past.

Other urls found in this thread:

fidonews.ca/fnews/index.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

I like this, let's talk about it

Anyone remembers fidonet?

There needs to be a way to display porn.avi on the terminal. Otherwise gopher is doomed!

There is. You can easily run mpv with framebuffer video output.

ipfs, freenet, tor, i2p, gnunet. All works.
ipfs looks most interesting, not anonymous, but there is work done making it to use through i2p or tor.

Wait, but what's the use? It doesn't matter what regular people want to use, what matter is what big corporations want to use. If the youtube will implement some strict DRM protocols preventing user from downloading video it would not matter that I had set up my own home page with outdated protocol from past century.

Been thinking about that lately, and T.J.'s comments about the importance of keeping the government and companies out of infrastructure.

Also apparently there was FidoNews released in 2015. Crazy.

fidonews.ca/fnews/index.html

T E L N E T
E
L
N
E
T

anyone who says gnunet is a literal shill considering its a abandoned project and has been mentioned as such for a long time

you can expect vulnerabilities
stop suggesting it

S S H
S
H

IPFS seems like a more hopeful project.

Just hope we can replace HTML/CSS with something better. More like postscript.

Start by sharing guides, also, how secure is gopher?

You are wrong, GNUnet is the future.

I don't see why GNUnet should be used when there are much better alternatives such as IPFS.

just connect to ur local bbses
ssh is bloat and doesnt serve the same purpose

There's no encryption with Gopher, so not secure on that front, BUT I doubt many people are scrounging the protocol in the first place.

Why not the future? Check out Urbit, OP.

why have encryption.

If you share cp or something, then encrypt individual objects.

Ethereum/IPFS/Whisper is a web 3.0 stack worth examining.

GNUnet can replace the internet protocol, is a bit large explanation but it certainly be patient and read their docs.

The problem with a lot of these ideas is that they always bump up against storage space and speed, which could never match that of major companies.

At least with NNTP/Usenet and Gopher it's largely based on puretext, so it's much smaller and bandwidth far less of an issue.

I absolutely agree. One of the things that scare new users of GNUnet is the time the have to spend to connect, so they bail out before even trying.

I'd just wish there was a way to encrypt Gopher.

Does gopher and other non HTTP protocols support imageboards or textboards?

NNTP obviously does, of a sort, because it's Usenet, there's also NNTPchan.Gopher also supports it, but it's really not very elegant at all, it's basically turning a search term into an addition to the text file that's the conversation.

And of course there's telnet/ssh based BBSs.

tor ipfs and zeronet are literally the last prospects

>last updated
0.10.1 (April 8, 2014; 3 years ago[1]) [±]

just stop...

It really is bad that "connecting" is a major issue. Even 300baud modems could handshake quicker.

>implying they don't constantly update their development repo

>implying that will ever see day

focus on spreading the protocols that work and are updated right now or they will end up like gnunet and all the other abandonded projects

>still implying is not currently developed

>textbased protocols save space

Least intelligent comment of the thread

if it takes you 3 years to roll out the next stable release thats very irrespondible to their user base

face the facts

Agree with that, but won't imply the lie on the project been deprecated, like you did

Gopher0 was mainly designed as read-only. Some Gopher boards take advantage of one user interactivity feature, search items that let the user send a string of text to the server, which is meant to be used as a query for searching but the server can do whatever it wants with it, as a means of posting. Others may use another protocol like telnet for posting instead.

Gopher+ was given forms much like HTML forms which would solve this issue, but only the original UMN gopher client and gopherd server fully support these Gopher+ features, and they have fallen behind other Gopher clients and servers in other features so nobody uses them.

Oh and, check some out for yourself:
gopher://port70.net/1/chan
gopher://gopher.su/1/board
gopher://khzae.net/1/chan

Top uses telnet via a Python script they provide, the other two use the search item method.

Text based content saves space, by nature. A text file is smaller than a Vlog or podcast, even though they contain the same information.

>mfw html made for documents
>worse at documents than pretty much every other markup at the time

The web is a piece of trash, built on "that'll do", and it got far too out of hand. The internet is a fantastic creation, it's the web that ruins it.

Why not just build a web site entirely with tags?

More effort than using Gopher, and if you want plebs to be able to access your gopherhole you can use a server like pygopherd which basically does what you suggest automatically, serves HTML versions of your gopher menus to clients connecting over HTTP, marked up with something like tags to keep the plain text formatting.

How is just using more complicated than setting up Gopher?

That emphasizes the encrypted objects though, as opposed to them looking the same as everything else also encrypted

Because gophermaps are much more compact than writing HTML

foobar.txt
vs.
0foobar.txt

If you just want to serve a directory's contents as-is except with a little custom intro text:
Here are some cool files:
?*

Or maybe with some grouping
Here are some cool text files:
0*.txt

And here's some pictures:
I*.jpg

And the setup for that is:
apt-get install pygopherd
which gives you a Gopher server and HTTP server serving the same content.

That's cool and all, but these days the "compactness" doesn't matter, and the ease is done away with through *.html generators.

>0foobar.txt
What if I want to link to 0foobar.txt?

I suspect you and the gopher devs didn't really think this through.

XML is great when it's not abused. Actually, the fact that it's flexible enough to be abused is one of its "features".

00foobar.txt


Only the first character is used.

What about usenet? I dont mean the binary, but the text discussions.

>but these days the "compactness" doesn't matter
Sounds like you're in the wrong thread to begin with, then. Why even bother with the whole tag thing then? Just use flavour-of-the-month web framework.

Then it's just
00foobar.txt
It's hard to see because Sup Forums changes them to spaces, but the TAB character is what actually distinguishes an item from informational text in a gophermap.

If your filename has tabs in it, then that could be a problem, since the protocol itself wouldn't allow a selector with arbitrary tabs in it.

Actually pretty lively, more-so than a lot of web-based textboards, which is also the case for a lot of telnet BBSs.

They also have the feature to push and pull comments, which I love because the internet connection here decides to drop for hours at a time for no reason.

>Just use flavour-of-the-month web framework.
I don't think you can compare 20bytes more per link with multi-MB of JS.

>acts like any of this matters

It isn't like it's its own internet. Ya still have to pay an ISP to access it and they can still snoop on ya. So, why would it matter what's used at all? You are still paying to access it, and the person you pay to access the internet/darknet/whatevernet can spy on you.

Technically, you're welcome to serve up HTML/XML/CSS/Javascript/etc. over Gopher. The only real technical difference is the protocol. The real attraction is like the OP says, the web is popular and hence the main target for pushing advertising/DRM/etc. while Gopher, by virtue of being totally forgotten by the mainstream, has remained "pure".