Gopher, The Competing Standard To WWW In The ’90s Is Still Worth Checking Out

sehnsucht

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Feb 4, 2022, 3:37:12 AM2/4/22

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"The 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web passed earlier this year.
Naturally, this milestone was met with truckloads of nerdy fanfare and
pining for those simpler times. In three decades, the Web has evolved
from a promising niche experiment to being an irreplaceable component of
global discourse. For all its many faults, the Web has become all but
essential for billions around the world, and isn’t going anywhere soon.

As the mainstream media lauded the immense success for the Web, another
Internet information system also celebrated thirty years – Gopher. A
forgotten heavyweight of the early Internet, the popularity of Gopher
plummeted during the late 90s, and nearly disappeared entirely.
Thankfully, like its plucky namesake, Gopher continued to tunnel across
the Internet well into the 21st century, supported by a passionate
community and with an increasing number of servers coming online."

https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standard-to-www-in-the-90s-is-still-worth-checking-out/
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gopher://tilde.pink:70/1/~snowcrash/

rtr

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Feb 6, 2022, 2:00:10 AM2/6/22

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It's a good article. I just hoped that the author provided more
case towards gopher. It seemed like he was enjoying his time in
gopherspace.

I think gopher and gemini still has a huge usecase for them. It's
very easy to host a gopherhole and gemini capsule nowadays and
their lightweight nature means that they can run on even the most
puny VPS servers or RPis out there. Couple that with a protocol
like Yggdrasil and you can basically broadcast to the world
regardless of your network status or computing resources.

--
Ang kalayaan ay dili gihatag, ini'y giabot.
--
{gemini,gopher}://kalayaan.xyz

Ander GM

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Feb 12, 2022, 2:45:29 PM2/12/22

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I would like to have more info about Yggdrasil.

meff

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Feb 13, 2022, 5:37:44 PM2/13/22

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On 2022-02-12, Ander GM <an...@disroot.org> wrote:
> I would like to have more info about Yggdrasil.

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go

Yggdrasil is a P2P overlay IPv6 network with E2E encryption. You
generate a local private/public keypair and your public key is used to
determine the IPv6 /64 that is associated with the keypair. Packets
are overlayed atop regular IPv4 or IPv6 links and contain the inner
IPv6 payload encrypted.

If you host Gopher on Yggdrasil then you get encryption for free.

rtr

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Feb 14, 2022, 2:00:07 PM2/14/22

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Hi Meff and Ander,

Exactly that. You've explained it better than I ever could. One thing to
add is that being an overlay network, Yggdrasil allows machines
which are under strict and CG-NAT to connect to the outside world without
a static DNS. As long as they are peered with a machine that is
connectable from the outside world.

For example, my Yggdrasil Gopherhole:

gopher://[209:dead:1cc2:970:637b:450f:6575:9a24]/1

is living in a low-end PC at home. That box is running Yggdrasil which
is peered with a couple of public nodes. This makes self-hosting quite a
breeze.

Cheers!

sehnsucht

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Feb 14, 2022, 4:25:16 PM2/14/22

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Sul meriggio di 120222 19:45,
Ander GM <an...@disroot.org> enarrava tali parole:

> I would like to have more info about Yggdrasil.

Have a look here:
g.nixers.net/0/~z3bra/rlog/yggdrasil-bootstrap-node.txt
--
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.„