I just arrived in the Republic. This is my first phlog here. This is
also my first writing in english for a blog or a phlog. I am sorry
for all the future mistakes I will certainly do.
As everyone here, I prefer minimalism than big and bloat. I
discovered Gopher only a few months ago. In the 1990s, I think I
never used it. Perhaps because I was living at five kilometers from
the CERN in Geneva… which is quite far away from Minnesota.
I like it for simplicity, for dealing with plain text and for the
focus it brings on reading, through uniformity of presentation and
lack of images. I feel for a long time that surfing on the web is not
really reading. It is often like watching a movie with the forward
acceleration and just playing some parts of it. I like serendipity in
the web surfing, but I think it is important to keep other techniques
to get information through internet in a more hierarchical and less
rhizomatic way. Surfing is like gaming: it is very pleasant, but it
is more time consuming than really efficient in any serious purpose.
I have a self-hosted website in french with pelican static blog
engine. I recently copied the material to a self-hosted gopherhole.
During the first weeks I was exploring Gopher, I just used Veronica
search engine to find Gopherholes and the whole thing seemed to me
fragmented, abandoned and quite empty. Then I discovered the Pubnix
communities like SDF or Circumlunar and realized that this world was
on the contrary quite active and living. That is why I joined one of
them.
I will keep my french phlogs on my self-hosted server and try to
write some words in english here from time to time.
