Welcome to the Magical Fish onion service over gopher. This hole runs on a Raspberry Pi and is built with Flask Gopher. It favors formatting for mobile browsers like Pocket Gopher and Diggie Dog.
Magical.Fish was created to show solidarity with the idea that a small, privacy respecting internet is both useful and necessary. In a world of consolidating choices, I agree that we can assert ourselves by taking what is old and making it new and relevant.
Magical.fish began as, and still is, my personal gopherspace start page.
This onion version of Magical.fish is different from the clearnet hole. Here, we favor .onion sites. Any clearnet selectors linked from here will be clearly labled as such. We would eventually like there to be enough services directly offered over Tor so that we will not have to add selectors back to clearnet gopher holes.
But magical.fish and its onion counterpart are not just
a bunch of selectors (links). We are regularly adding other
real time and interactive services. To help my coding
skills, I hope to continue adding more services in the
near future so check back regularly to see what is new.
Gopher has become useful to me as a way of accessing all kinds of information that I would otherwise have to find on the web. I use it every day, not out of nostalgia or pity, but because it is a useful, non-invasive way of consuming information.
From the active selectors/links you find on Magical Fish,
you will be able to access local weather, get real time
stock quotes, find answers on Wikipedia, read news feeds
for major news organizations, look up movie show times
for theaters near you, read 'phlogs' from interesting
people, and more.
There's plenty to do today in gopherspace, so make gopher part of your routine. What I hope magical fish contributes to your life is an organized way to discover and access gopher content, while also adding a few new services.
So isn't this just duplicating the web? No, not at all.
The web is simply a front end to a database, one that is
very effective at surveilling you and turning you into a
product. Mobile apps are essentially the same thing.
Using a gopher 'presentation layer' to consume information
is simply another option, a different experience to the
web and apps, fast and low bandwidth, and presently
an experience that is vastly less invasive to your privacy.
So why call this hole magical.fish, and not something
more gopherish? It happened to be a domain I already
owned. I think its memorable and lighthearted. Maybe
someday it can be magical.gopher.
Since I am primarily a mobile user of gopher, and because I want
to encourage you to take gopherspace with you on mobile,
the services here will be heavily optimised for smaller screens.
If you like this hole, please tell others about it.
