I read a bbs message from sloum who made a few days ago a comparison
which I found quite bright. He compared the gopherspace to a quiet
life in countryside where the Web would be a hectic life in a big
city.
That's clearly part of what I feel attractive with Gopher. In the
web, you have to manage the rush: a lot of things are happening every
minute and you just cannot follow the tempo. You always think you
missed something and it is true. The new articles from a week ago can
be difficult to find on a website which is often configured to push
new items in the showcase and to hide older ones. For other things
than blogs, you will probably need to use a search engine and to look
quite carefully in the results.
With Gopher, things a more stable and slow, but they stay here,
because it is more static and less dynamic.
No one tries to sell you new items, so the timeline is just a stable
structure that can be integrated to the phlog and helps you to find
the information.
Inside a pubnix community, you have the benefits of a little village
without the disadvantages: pseudos can preserve your anonymity if you
need it, but the community size is small enough to preserve from the
impersonal relationships in big towns. In a way, you know your
virtual neighbors and can speak with them easily.
On a Mastodon web instance, for example, the situation is quite
different. You don't share a lot more with all the many users of the
instance than the main public tool to communicate. You cannot build
or modify the common tools with them, for example. You are the
clients of the server, not the users. The sharing is just about
communications, not about building things together.
In this pubnix, I was very pleased to find a lot of tools and advices
to use them, which are created and shared by users. People don't just
talk. They try to improve their virtual world.
