As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.
Gopher was not the original protocol of the web but an alternative to HTTP/hypertext. It didn’t get the same traction, however, and has practically been dead for decades.
The only solace I take in the enshittification of the web and the resulting rise in prices, is that we might see (be forced into) a return to the small web and an escape from the stranglehold that big tech and social media has had on us for the last 15 years.
If we’re lucky, the late-stage capitalism effect of ruining companies long term futures for short term gains might happen to entire industries instead of companies.
I see a lot of potential for it to push people back to the small web too. Lots of people becoming interested in personal blogs lately, decentralized social media, the whole indie web movement, etc.
Hell yeah! I’ve been blogging for a couple years but I just use Micro.blog. I’d like to switch to something completely self hosted one of these days though.
and decided that its all too much. wordpress get hacked daily. writefreely wouldn’t install. And some of the other centralized services kinda suck. So im back to old:
nginx with a director filled with txt files haha.
Ill publish as time goes on and by interest. Ill take a look at micro.blog too. But im thinking I might create a neocities at some point just for the fun of it.
I’ve been really curious about Ghost lately! I set it up in a container on pikapods not too long ago but I ended up staying on Micro.blog. Something I really liked that I had no idea about beforehand was that they have their own little Discover feed over there right? It felt too serious for me when I mostly run an old school link/microblog kinda blog and it seems SO optimized for mailing lists and subscribers
Yeah, there is a lot of focus on getting your site out, but I just ignore all that part. I just wanted a nice place to self-host my travels without having to think much about it and it seems to fit that bill. But yeah, there is a place to discover other feeds and to comment on other people’s posts from the Fediverse and what not.
Yes, My home network setup is a bit complicated but I am using Pfsense so I have things on separate vlans with internal firewall rules to reduce risks.
All traffic in on port 443 is routed from Cloudflare to an NginX reverse proxy which decides how to connect back into my network for things
Years ago I would just run a server on the network with 443, 80 and 22 exposed directly to the world and never had any major issues. (Other than the normal automated attacks trying to gain shell access over SSH)
Gotcha, vlan setup sounds like the best possible way to do it, I don’t trust my security skills at all, 22 with fail2ban is about as far as I trust myself!
Most of these things are pretty secure out of the box.
Even without fail2ban disabling root login and only allowing SSH key authentication makes those scripts just a waste of time for the attacker. That game is a low effort attempt to just get the low hanging fruit for botnets though.
Definitely. The conditions that created this version of the web have been gone for some time now. We’ve gone from connections that were temporarily and required hours to download a few minutes of postage stamp sized video. To always on connections capable of streaming multiple HD streams faster than real time in both directions.
For my part I’m also looking in to purchasing and trying to set up a small Adhoc mesh Halow network and running a few services on it for myself and any others in the neighborhood that are interested. A small, free (after the hardware) anarchist wireless network. 16mbps can do a lot with simple services, etc.Plus, if a number of people in the area decided to adopt and contribute more nodes to the mesh, you could go faster still.
That sounds like a fantastic way to go. You might also look at meshtastic.
It’s a much different use case, being for text messaging and stuff like that only. But, while it may be low bandwidth, it’s still incredibly interesting.
I jumped on Meshtastic but found it got too congested with noise in a medium-sized city making it difficult to get much out there. Switched to Meshcore and have had a much better time communicating. Seattle’s full on made it equivalent to SMS, which makes me jealous. But YMMV 🤷🏼♂️
What preset were you using at the time? I know that longfast is not the best preset for larger networks that have a lot of users.
Personally, open source matters to me much more than the speed or congestion or whatever, which is why I chose meshtastic. Because the mesh core, foam applications are not open source.
Until there is an open source version, I absolutely refuse to touch it. I know that the underlying software is open source, but without having open source interfaces, I’m still refusing to touch it.
https://reticulum.network/ is also pretty good for small info packets. Does a LOT more than meshtastic…but its VERY difficult to set up. Or at least it was for me.
Its a pipe dream but having small internet without a major ISP would be fantastic. But it will never happen as it is. Friends are thinking of creating a meshnet though just for fun.
Yes, the bandwidth would be the damper there. It’s great for transmitting just a little bit of data, long distances. But for any sort of bigger data we transmit regularly on phones and desktop. It becomes unfeasible, even low resolution images.It definitely has a range benefit, though that’s for sure.I think fellow Missourian Jeff Geerling had a video out a while back where he talked about using it to contact people below his flight on the way to open sauce.
The 90-minute live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS, which demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <ahref=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.
That depends on how you define the web. If you only call the web the web when it was named the web and not what it was before it was named the web. Then yes you’re correct that was before the web. The question is, is that a semantic or significant difference? ARPANET was still a web of interconnected systems. For an old goober like myself.who was using FidoNet net back in the mid 80s. And the actual internet in the late 80s, early 90s. I definitely remember Gophering on the Internet. Plenty of places still maintained gopher directories till the mid 90s.
The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)
This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!
This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple’s Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn’t networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.
This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:
Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.
I would argue that’s not quite correct. You can absolutely transfer HTML files over gopher, but you’re not going to be viewing it in the gopher program.It was very much designed to be what most people would be more familiar with in concept as an FTP server today, almost. Pretty much all you could view in app were plain text files. and no links between. Everything else was a directory of files to be downloaded.
Gemini is definitely a bit of an inbetween. It does allow for linking between documents, but otherwise keeps everything simple and small, much like Gopher did.
I much prefer browsing the web instead of 2-clicking within each FTP path. (If you built a client to 2-click that for you then that’s just the HTTP web with extra steps.)
I converted my blog from WordPress to a static site generator using Gemini’s version of Markdown as the base format, and then hosted both HTTP and Gemini versions.
I later took down the Gemini version. The web site remains as static HTML driven by (a variation of) Markdown. No cookies, no JS, limited CSS. Even took out some old YouTube <iframe> tags and converted them to straight links to videos. Doing it this way does everything anyone would want out of Gemini without having to use a specialized client.
We should be promoting some kind of browser extension that flags a site as having no cookies and no JS.
As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.
Gopher was not the original protocol of the web but an alternative to HTTP/hypertext. It didn’t get the same traction, however, and has practically been dead for decades.
The only solace I take in the enshittification of the web and the resulting rise in prices, is that we might see (be forced into) a return to the small web and an escape from the stranglehold that big tech and social media has had on us for the last 15 years.
If we’re lucky, the late-stage capitalism effect of ruining companies long term futures for short term gains might happen to entire industries instead of companies.
Back to dial up internet and BBS
I see a lot of potential for it to push people back to the small web too. Lots of people becoming interested in personal blogs lately, decentralized social media, the whole indie web movement, etc.
Just started mine! In plain html/txt. Just for fun. Eventually get rss up and running.
Hell yeah! I’ve been blogging for a couple years but I just use Micro.blog. I’d like to switch to something completely self hosted one of these days though.
nice! I took a look at all the options…
and decided that its all too much. wordpress get hacked daily. writefreely wouldn’t install. And some of the other centralized services kinda suck. So im back to old: nginx with a director filled with txt files haha.
Ill publish as time goes on and by interest. Ill take a look at micro.blog too. But im thinking I might create a neocities at some point just for the fun of it.
Neocities isn’t a bad option tbh. I haven’t used it in a minute but if you’re thinking about neocities I really really liked bearblog.dev too!
I just spun up my own Ghost blog, being self-hosted and interacts with the Fediverse. Plus it’s pretty without me needing to know how.
I’ve been really curious about Ghost lately! I set it up in a container on pikapods not too long ago but I ended up staying on Micro.blog. Something I really liked that I had no idea about beforehand was that they have their own little Discover feed over there right? It felt too serious for me when I mostly run an old school link/microblog kinda blog and it seems SO optimized for mailing lists and subscribers
Yeah, there is a lot of focus on getting your site out, but I just ignore all that part. I just wanted a nice place to self-host my travels without having to think much about it and it seems to fit that bill. But yeah, there is a place to discover other feeds and to comment on other people’s posts from the Fediverse and what not.
I got 1gbps internet (symmetrical) and a raspberry pi cluster… running my own Wordpress never made more sense… AND that botch should scale!
You’re comfortable port forwarding onto your own network?
Yes, My home network setup is a bit complicated but I am using Pfsense so I have things on separate vlans with internal firewall rules to reduce risks.
All traffic in on port 443 is routed from Cloudflare to an NginX reverse proxy which decides how to connect back into my network for things
Years ago I would just run a server on the network with 443, 80 and 22 exposed directly to the world and never had any major issues. (Other than the normal automated attacks trying to gain shell access over SSH)
Gotcha, vlan setup sounds like the best possible way to do it, I don’t trust my security skills at all, 22 with fail2ban is about as far as I trust myself!
The hammering 22 gets is astonishing though.
Most of these things are pretty secure out of the box.
Even without fail2ban disabling root login and only allowing SSH key authentication makes those scripts just a waste of time for the attacker. That game is a low effort attempt to just get the low hanging fruit for botnets though.
I’ve been seeing a slow but steady movement that direction too
You got links? Ive been working on something that fits right into this, too. It’s time, y’all.
Definitely. The conditions that created this version of the web have been gone for some time now. We’ve gone from connections that were temporarily and required hours to download a few minutes of postage stamp sized video. To always on connections capable of streaming multiple HD streams faster than real time in both directions.
For my part I’m also looking in to purchasing and trying to set up a small Adhoc mesh Halow network and running a few services on it for myself and any others in the neighborhood that are interested. A small, free (after the hardware) anarchist wireless network. 16mbps can do a lot with simple services, etc.Plus, if a number of people in the area decided to adopt and contribute more nodes to the mesh, you could go faster still.
That sounds like a fantastic way to go. You might also look at meshtastic.
It’s a much different use case, being for text messaging and stuff like that only. But, while it may be low bandwidth, it’s still incredibly interesting.
I jumped on Meshtastic but found it got too congested with noise in a medium-sized city making it difficult to get much out there. Switched to Meshcore and have had a much better time communicating. Seattle’s full on made it equivalent to SMS, which makes me jealous. But YMMV 🤷🏼♂️
What preset were you using at the time? I know that longfast is not the best preset for larger networks that have a lot of users.
Personally, open source matters to me much more than the speed or congestion or whatever, which is why I chose meshtastic. Because the mesh core, foam applications are not open source.
Until there is an open source version, I absolutely refuse to touch it. I know that the underlying software is open source, but without having open source interfaces, I’m still refusing to touch it.
https://reticulum.network/ is also pretty good for small info packets. Does a LOT more than meshtastic…but its VERY difficult to set up. Or at least it was for me.
Its a pipe dream but having small internet without a major ISP would be fantastic. But it will never happen as it is. Friends are thinking of creating a meshnet though just for fun.
Yes, the bandwidth would be the damper there. It’s great for transmitting just a little bit of data, long distances. But for any sort of bigger data we transmit regularly on phones and desktop. It becomes unfeasible, even low resolution images.It definitely has a range benefit, though that’s for sure.I think fellow Missourian Jeff Geerling had a video out a while back where he talked about using it to contact people below his flight on the way to open sauce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
In 1968
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with
<em></em>,<a href=""></a>, and<h1></h1>anymore, for example.<blink>Welcome to my web page under construction</blink>That depends on how you define the web. If you only call the web the web when it was named the web and not what it was before it was named the web. Then yes you’re correct that was before the web. The question is, is that a semantic or significant difference? ARPANET was still a web of interconnected systems. For an old goober like myself.who was using FidoNet net back in the mid 80s. And the actual internet in the late 80s, early 90s. I definitely remember Gophering on the Internet. Plenty of places still maintained gopher directories till the mid 90s.
BBS ARE THE WEB GUYS
The community noticeboard at the general store is the web! /s
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple’s Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn’t networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.
This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.
Why Gofer when Gemini?
I sympathize, but Gopher is designed against hypertext (inline links in text). It is impossible to have e.g. Wikipedia transmitted over Gopher.
I would argue that’s not quite correct. You can absolutely transfer HTML files over gopher, but you’re not going to be viewing it in the gopher program.It was very much designed to be what most people would be more familiar with in concept as an FTP server today, almost. Pretty much all you could view in app were plain text files. and no links between. Everything else was a directory of files to be downloaded.
Gemini is definitely a bit of an inbetween. It does allow for linking between documents, but otherwise keeps everything simple and small, much like Gopher did.
I much prefer browsing the web instead of 2-clicking within each FTP path. (If you built a client to 2-click that for you then that’s just the HTTP web with extra steps.)
Impossible? gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1
on mobile rn, how well does that do inline links?
It doesn’t at all. It’s just text content. They could have put all the links at the end as a menu I guess, but it doesnt even have that.
deleted by creator
I still think the web took a wrong turn when NCSA Mosaic first stated supporting inline images.
Gemini space baby! What’s old is new again.
Meh.
I converted my blog from WordPress to a static site generator using Gemini’s version of Markdown as the base format, and then hosted both HTTP and Gemini versions.
I later took down the Gemini version. The web site remains as static HTML driven by (a variation of) Markdown. No cookies, no JS, limited CSS. Even took out some old YouTube
<iframe>tags and converted them to straight links to videos. Doing it this way does everything anyone would want out of Gemini without having to use a specialized client.We should be promoting some kind of browser extension that flags a site as having no cookies and no JS.
I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.
Fuck yes.