Why Gopher in 2026?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

- https://geminiprotocol.net

- https://reticulum.network

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.

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