Over the years, internet has transformed from something that could
help us in our everyday life to something that is necessary in our
everyday life. It touches every single aspect of our life: work,
relationships, education and more. While it helped us in many ways,
the modern web has so many problems. Most websites track every move
you do, companies exploit your data to influence your decisions and
make a profit off of you, and while there are ways to block ads and
trackers, the problem still remains.
Not only that, the web is also extremely complex, so complex that
building a http client for the modern web has become pretty much
impossible. This is where gopher comes in.
The Gopher protocol is a protocol to distribute documents over the
internet. It is designed to be very simple, both to use and write
sites in, and its only goal is to serve you content, not track you.
A protocol like this allows users to be more in control of the
content they access, and how they access it.
Gopher is a protocol, it has it's flaws (such as the lack of
encryption) and it's not meant to replace the web, but it's
simplicity make it perfect for personal or text-only websites.
Being way smaller than the www has it's advantages too. It creates
more of a sense of a community, and sites on gopher look more
similar to the personal websites people had in the beginning of the
internet. I'd encourage everyone to try and setup a gopher site,
or simply just browse the gopherspace, there's a lot of cool stuff
out there.
