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"Plain Text in Plain Sight: Smaller Alternatives to the World Wide Web"
by Colin Cogle
Written May 28, 2022.
Re-published online February 6, 2023.
Originally published in "2600: The Hacker Quarterly", Volume 39:2.
Please support the official release by buying a copy or subscription:
https://store.2600.com/collections/2020-2021/products/summer-2022
https://store.2600.com/collections/2020-2021/products/new-issue-pdf-summer-2022
What's wrong with the World Wide Web? You open a browser, connect to a
server (usually securely), and interact with content. With a few clicks,
you can get news, sports scores, movies, inane updates from people you
may know, cat pictures, hacker magazines, dinner... what's not to love?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee published the first website in December 1990, where
he described his new document management system, hypertext, and the
markup language for it. Though he continues to shape the incessantly-
evolving ecosystem as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium, there
are problems with the modern Web which will likely outlive us: ads,
trackers, megabytes of JavaScript bloat, DRM, cookies, non-consensual
data collection and analytics, pop-ups, pop-overs, pop-unders, autoplay-
ing music, commercialization, compartmentalization, autoplaying video in
the corners of news articles, top-ten lists spread across eleven pages,
ugly Facebook share buttons everywhere (even on PornHub for some reason,
in case someone out there thinks their family and friends will love
this video). And that's just off the top of my head.
It's easy to be an old man yelling at a cloud. It should surprise no
one that the World Wide Web is here to stay. However, that doesn't mean
we can't come up with alternatives. In fact, we already have -- and I'm
not talking about mobile apps or Tor Browser.
GO FOR GOPHER
When you strip away everything superfluous, you're left with plain text.
No formatting, no scripting -- just words on a page. That was the idea
behind Gopher. Named for the University of Minnesota's mascot (in case
you were wondering), Gopher is a filesystem-inspired protocol to make
your computer "go-fer" information.
Gopher sites (sometimes called Gopher holes, because why not) are typic-
ally presented as a text-based menu. You have words, and you have links
to folders, files, or other sites. That's _it_. Unlike the Web, all Go-
pher sites look the same and navigate identically. It's truly a product
of a time when NFT stood for nice fucking Tamagotchi.
This forced simplicity is part of the reason why it failed. While HTML
is forgiving of mistakes, Gophermaps are strict and make you follow RFC
1436 down to a T. Needless to say, once customizing your MySpace pages
became a thing, Gopher was looking very long in the tooth. Browsers
eventually removed support, getting rid of it like an unwanted rodent.
Somehow, though, Gopherspace isn't dead. In the past fifteen years, the
number of Gopher servers online has tripled. Servers, clients, and
(ironically) Web browser extensions continue to be developed. Most
notably, the Playdate handheld gaming system had its release notes only
available via Gopher, leading to some news coverage for the plaintext
protocol!
Gopher is more than nostalgia for the days when the Internet made noise
when you turned it on. You can find news, weather, search engines, home
pages, phlogs (the equivalent of blogs), and more. Perhaps this little
rodent living under the Web isn't so dead after all.
BLAST OFF WITH GEMINI
Fast-forward to 2019. A person by the handle Solderpunk was frustrated
with the WWW and how crazy things were getting. In an interview, he
said, "Visiting websites is basically a matter of downloading and run-
ning software, without any way to know in advance what that software
might do, and very little ability to pick and choose which things you
let it do." However, he also thought Gopher was too rigid and restrict-
ive. The community sat down and thought up something like "'the web,
stripped right back to its essence' or as 'Gopher, souped up and modern-
ized just a little'". The result was something these outer space buffs
called Project Gemini.
Like Gopher, it's another simple text-based protocol that was designed
to be intentionally difficult to expand, to avoid the feature creep that
the WWW underwent. However, Gemini sites (called "capsules") are more
modern, featuring Unicode, free-flowing text, gemtext (think: Markdown),
virtual hosting, TLS 1.3, and more.
In three short years, Gemini has gone from IRC discussions to something
implemented by over 2,000 servers, and it shows no signs of slowing
down. More capsules and gemlogs (again, "blogs") are rocketing into
Geminispace every day.
SO THE WEB IS DEAD, RIGHT?
No, and far from it. For general browsing, the World Wide Web is going
nowhere, and that's fine. I've spent this article trashing it, but the
good still vastly outweighs the bad. My bank will never implement
Gopher. Amazon won't be selling products on Gemini anytime soon.
Despite the big Web, there is definitely a place for the "small web"
these days.
Consider:
- - Has your computer gotten too slow to run Google Chrome? Is that old
Android tablet struggling? Did Apple cut off macOS updates for your
perfectly-good laptop? Don't fork over your hard-earned cash and make
more e-waste. A Gemini browser would make that old device feel like
new -- and put less strain on the old battery.
- - Perhaps you want to get your vintage computer or old cell phone back
online, but good luck using a 25-year-old Web browser. Gopher was
made for retrocomputing!
- - Traveling out to the boonies and stuck with dial-up or a 2G phone
signal? It's rare, but it happens. You could spend an hour watching
one web page open, or use Gemini and get it done in seconds.
- - Do you prefer the command line? Text-mode web browsers can be cumber-
some, but Gemini and Gopher were built for the terminal.
If you feel like everything online is getting bloated, and everyone
wants to track you and sell you their crap, there are thinner alterna-
tives. We can chat on IRC, talk on newsgroups, send email instead of
signing our lives away to Meta -- and now, we have some alternatives to
the ever-expanding Web. However you choose to do it, happy browsing!
WORKS CONSULTED AND FURTHER READING
Cogle, Colin. "Plain Text in Plain Sight: Smaller Alternatives to the
World Wide Web". "2600: The Hacker Quarterly", volume 39:2, August
2022, pp. 7-8, colincogle.name/blog/the-small-web/.
Anderson, Chris, and Michael Wolff. "The Web Is Dead. Long Live the
Internet." WIRED, Sept. 2010, wired.com/2010/08/ff-webrip/.
Accessed 27 May 2022.
Frank, Steven. "First Playdates shipping". Steven Frank's journal,
18 Apr. 2022,
gopher://stevenf.com/0/journal/2022/04/18/first-
playdates-shipping.txt. Accessed 24 May 2022.
Kaiser, Cameron. "Why is Gopher Still Relevant?" Overbite Project,
28 Oct. 2008,
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/gopher/relevance.txt.
Accessed 26 May 2022.
Littler, Clarissa. "Solderpunk Interview." beanz Magazine, Feb. 2021,
https://kidscodecs.com/interview-solderpunk. Accessed 26 May 2022.
"Project Gemini Speculative Specification." Project Gemini, 30 Jan.
2022, gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi.
Accessed 26 May 2022.
Proven, Liam. "The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still
around." The Register, 23 May 2022,
https://theregister.com/2022/
05/23/the_return_of_the_gopher/. Accessed 25 May 2022.
Tomasino, James. "What makes gopher special". gopher.black, 5 Mar 2018.
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180305-what-makes-gopher-special.
Accessed 25 May 2022.
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