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I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists.

For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.




I use it. And people keep working hard to replace the standards it is built on with unimplementable complex, insecure, poorly thought out crap.


You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.

Because there's no gopher client for macOS.

I bet if Google indexed Gopher sites at the outset, Gopher would still be a thing.


There are browser plugins: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/overbitewx/

They have very little use. There's also a web proxy:

http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw

Browsing it makes clear why Gopher would not still be a thing, except in the same sense that there are hobbyists who maintain Model Ts and steam engines and whatnot. For a time, Gopher was a miracle and a wonder. That time lasted about a year. The web does all it does and infinitely more.


Plenty of terminal-based options (e.g. Lynx) for Gopher.

Gopher pretty much died long before Google was a thing. Here's a good article: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... (lots of interesting comments below the article from many of the people involved)


Use lynx in your terminal emulator...

There is a vibrant international community of people still on gopher, and a lot of us run our own servers. Check out gopher://gopherproject.org

There you'll find a getting started file, and other useful things such as a curated site listing (think DMOZ for gopher) called the Gopher Lawn.


Why do people still run gopher servers? To keep some content/discussion open to only a self-selected community?




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