I stumbled into gopherspace less than a fortnight ago, without any
prior knowledge of the gopher protocol, or phlogs, or any of these
networks. First-up: thanks to all the people who are part of this
place. I've really appreciated surfing through really interesting
thoughts and worlds, and stuff being shared. There's something about
plaintext, together with this gopherspace framework and context, that
I can't quite put my finger on - but it seems to make a lot of sense.
Or seems preferable or advantageous to me, in many ways, when set
against the social network* (*I use this term broadly encompassing the
big key players, mainly Facebook & Twitter, at the time of writing).
I climbed down the gopherhole on a lazy Thursday afternoon off-work,
when the local heatwave finally broke and a refreshing storm and rain
broke overhead, and I had nothing too heavy on my To Do list but a
freshly brewed pot of coffee, a few little bits of personal admin and
the whole day ahead of me at home. Funnily enough, after months of
back-of-the-mind plotting, I decided on that day to go ahead and try
and hack back a bit at my digital footprint (this winding back off
online systems and services has been an ongoing thing with me over the
past couple of years). I gathered my data and deleted a whole bunch of
online accounts and was right in the middle of re-organising my
digital life when I came across a little introduction to gopher.
I appreciate how working with gopher brings things back to basics; I
think there's loads of potential here, both in gopher but also in some
of the seeds of thought here around information media design,
protocols, communication, etc. I've found a lot of musings around
these issues in some of the writing I've encountered so far, which has
made me feel some kind-of affinity with this place. But also I just
simply appreciate the plaintext, storytelling & journaling. Hopefully
I'll add to this place in a way that others will find of interest too.
