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USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It's like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene.
And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the
.project
or.plan
file on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically "ye olde status update".There's a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.
Heh.
Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary. The University of Minnesota owned the code and proposed to charge server owners for using it. Meanwhile Sir Tim over at CERN was handing out the original
httpd
under an MIT-style license.There was some early work supporting things like forms and search on Gopher. But it was pretty much abandoned as soon as WWW started catching on.
University of Minnesota, my dude...software named for their mascot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
That may be so but gopher was never any fun in comparison to www
Oh, it was - before we had the WWW. I remember the day when a co-student told me to have a look at this new web thingy, "like gopher, but with hypertext!".
"Markup" would be a better term here. Markdown is a specific markup language which Gemini doesn't use.
See this? These are the comments I live for. You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
That's neat! Thanks!
What's the cool thing to do there?
One cool thing is the game astrobotany, but Gemini shines in its focus on connecting through text only medium. Try midnight city for that.
(If you can't find URLs, ping me and I'll update the post)
Funnily enough I was toying with the idea of making a Gopher based Lemmy frontend for the lulz. Maybe Gemini then?
Wow thanks for this comment, Lagrange works incredibly well. I had a lot of fun trying out Gemini, I had been doing Gopher recently but Im definitely going to add this to my goofing around.