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   tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Thursday, 08-May-2025 08:49:33 JST tom jennings

   in reply to

   • vga256
   • Scott VE3QBZ

   @vga256

   Well I've since backed off gopher, for two reasons: one, the channel from server to client needs to be encrypted and the server-side data arrangement is too barbaric and error prone.

   Many home ISPs actually insert ads into peoples' browser streams; which of course means they're spying on everything. This is simply intolerable. Everything needs encryption because the folk runnint teh innernets are universally scumbags.

   I know of no gopher client or server that can set up TLS/SSL.

   Server side, the old gophermap data structure is simply horrible; its extremely delicate, uses an invisible and problematic character (ASCII TAB) as a critical marker, is grossly unstructured.

   The semantics are chaos and not merely undstandardized, which I'm less concerned by, but all over the place. It's extremely difficult to script arranging/manipulating content.

   I make websites with a subset of HTML5 and CSS. I manage it with perl scripts. It's far from ideal, but it's utterly ubiquitous stuff. A server that could deliver a stripped subset of HTML would be a great start.

   This stuff needs to serve us, not the other way round. I like writing code, but it just ended up as a bunch of busy work, for me.

   Port 80/443 is fraught. I don't know what to do. I had all sorts or gyrations to go through this week to get a VM up that could run letsencrypt (which by this point is damn easy to set up).

   I wish it were otherwise; and it can't be extreme-nerd to set up. I may or may not be smart enough to do that; but I don't want to. There's too much to do already!

   @scott

   • pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 08-May-2025 08:49:34 JST vga256

     • Scott VE3QBZ

     back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.

     i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.

     i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @tomjennings and @scott, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet

     this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.

     it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

     #kiki #worldWideWeb #GopherProtocol #gopherspace #indieWeb #smolWeb

     pistolero repeated this.