Starting in 2025, I'm mirroring this blog on my Gopher site. What's a Gopher site, how do you access it, and why am I posting content there? That's what this post is about.
Essentially, Gopher was the Internet before the Internet existed. The infrastructure for computers to communicate existed, and people had started using it to phone in to public servers and post files (articles, academic research, silly pictures, sound bites, and much of the same stuff we put online today) to share with other people with modems (which was still uncommon, at the time). Gopher was a protocol an admin could run on a server to define who in the world could access various files on that server. It's the same functionality that web servers are used for today, which is why you can watch a video on Youtube but you can't bypass Youtube and access the software that runs Youtube.
Eventually, Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea of HTML, and the HTTP protocol with URLs to navigate, and the World Wide Web (www) was born.
This frankly superiour system became so popular that most people today think of the www as the Internet.
However, www is actually just one subdomain of the Internet, and there's "secretly" a lot more online than just sites that start with www.
Of course, most of it is only secret because it's not widely used. It's entirely possible to run a Gopher server, or an FTP server, Usenet, RSS, or even a BBS on the Internet today. The Internet is the network. It's one computer talking to another. The computers communicate over radio waves (WiFi) and cables and switches and routers, but the "language" (or "protocol" in computer lingo) they use is up to you.
I don't love Gopher as a protocol. It's remarkably inferiour to HTML and HTTP. Its markup is simple but rather painful to use. And it obviously doesn't have the audience, in terms of number, that HTTP has. So why am I using Gopher in 2025?
The thing about Gopher (and its modern spiritual successor, Gemini) is that because its audience is smaller in number, the audience is necessarily more, well, human. The modern web, even before companies started pushing AI, has a vast amount of content by and for "robots". To get views, web pages must be optimized for search engines, which means that authors stuff pages with keywords that Google and Adobe analytics say people use in searches. They're formatted for the way search engines parse information. Your movements are traced and recorded so search engines and analytic companies can invent new ways to discourage users from leaving a specific site (or branded site system). The result, paradoxically, is not a better web for humans, but a web that serves the programs indexing and parsing content.
That's why when you search for something online, you get 3 sponsored posts trying to sell you something, 10 results of literally the same poorly-written article that answers every query but the one you asked on a topic, 8 results of forum posts of people arguing about the topic of your query, and a million pages of further results that in no way apply to your query. The web isn't bad it's just not as good as could or should be, and I think part of the reason is that it's buckling under its own weight. The companies financing the servers and power running the Internet want to make more money, and so they're optimizing the fun right out of the web.
Gopher is not inherently better than the www space, but it's not encumbered by the problems of the web. If companies suddenly took interest in Gopher, we could all work together to make it an inhospitable place, too. It has equal potential. Realistically, Gopher is an abandoned technology with a cult following.
As with anything with a cult following, there are potential pitfalls. How can it survive without growing its user base? What would happen were it to become popular? Is it elitist to intentionally use technology that most people can't stumble into by opening a web browser? These are interesting topics, by varying degrees, and it's a fun conversation to have on Gopher itself. And that's what Gopher is, in the end. It's a breakout room, away from the noise of the rat race that the web has become.
For most people, the Overbite Project is the best source of updated Gopher information.
It lists some browser extensions and phone apps you can use to access the Gopher network.
The project also maintains a Gopher proxy site (use the Standard Version, on the right side of the page) that allows you to type in a gopher:// address and view the site in your web browser.
If you're a Linux or UNIX geek, then you can also just use the lynx command to access a Gopher site directly.
I don't love Gopher for what it is, but I love Gopher for what it is not. The web isn't built for people any more. Gopherspace has fewer people, but it's unquestionably a network of actual people. Just like on the web, not all of us are interesting people, or interested in making personal connections, or interested in the same topics as the next person, and so on. However, we're a collection of people, and not search engines and analytics.
You can visit my Gopherspace at gopher://gopher.info-underground.net, in the Klaatu directory.
Solarized GNUby Linux Pictures under the idgaf license.