Running another attempt at creating a visual map of current gopher
space. That is, a visual graph of which server links to which other
servers. Maybe a 3D version, I don't know.
This is harder than you might think. There are at least a few hundred
gopher servers alive according to floodgap[0] and some of them are huge.
[0]:
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/v2/vstat
Floodgap's stats currently list 289 servers and my crawler already
returned 293 servers after running for about an hour. Let's see how this
continues. Maybe that's all the servers there are, maybe not.
In the process, I discovered some neat and/or otherwise curious things:
- The german magazine "taz" has a gopher hole: <
gopher://taz.de>
- Hangman: <
gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi>
- viste.fr also has tic tac toe. :-)
- GDPR is spreading. There really are some disclaimers and
"Datenschutzerklaerungen" on some servers, especially the german
ones.
- There are quite a lot of `.onion` domains. Maybe that's the famous
"dark net". Who knows.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Crawler still running after a few more hours. 316 gopher servers have
now been discovered and there are over 50'000 more selectors to check.
I'd say it's rather unlikely that the crawler will find a new link to an
entirely new gopher "island". So I guess that's pretty much it, about
300 servers alive.
Maybe I can stop at this point and try to plot the graph.
