Gopher, an Eternal Christmas on the Internet.
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LFA | 2025-10-16 | #phlog #gopher #xmas
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Yesterday I commented on Mastodon[1] that since I have this Gopher
hole I have published much more here than on my website. It's not a
premeditated thing, it's just that I'm much more satisfied with
Gopher than with the WWW and I'm not alone[2]. We can say this is
because I'm a command line freak who prefer clis to guis, we can also
say that this is because I really don't find much value in feeding
bots that are already most of the WWW traffic, but above all it's
because I feel much more comfortable in Gopher.

I don't know if you've seen any of those Christmas movies[3] where
you can see the typical hotel of the big hotel chain, completely
standardized and impersonal, vs the village's small family hotel.
In the end the family hotel always wins because it is much more
welcoming, people are nicer and the air you breathe is healthier and
quieter. To me, Gopher is that village's family hotel, much more
welcoming and nice than the standardized hotel that the web is.

Here there are no bots or at least there are a minimal amount of them.
When writing everything is very simple because it's plain text. You
just have to write and take care of the spelling. You don't have to
worry about the design, about fitting this here and that there, about
how it's going to look like on this device and on this other device,
etc. People usually take their time to read, think, and sometimes
sending you an email with their opinions, their recommendations or
to tell you that they liked your post or project.

The charm of Gopher (and also of Gemini) is its simplicity and the
people that stop here. Compared to the web, Gopher is an eternal
Christmas on the Internet.

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[1] In Spanish: https://hostux.social/@lfa/115379053504993338

[2] Phil's phlog: The horizon is beckoning, but no
    gopher://spike.nagatha.fr/1/phlog/2025-10-09-17-05-The-horizon-is-beckoning-but-no/

    The Wandering Geek: Goodbye Web
    gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/glog/goodbye-web.md

[3] If you haven't, the right time to do it is approaching ;-)