Weather, in #gopher!
@hellomiakoda Hells yes, I’m here for the gopher comeback
@Miakoda :neurodiversity: I've been hearing a lot about gopher but I have no idea what it is
@ferret Back before http, there was gopher. They released close together and were competition. Http won the protocol war. Though, really, it should have been AND not OR.
Gopher is a simplier protocol. It does only text and links. I don't know if it originally was able to download not-text, but it can now, just not render them. Only text. In fact, my gopher hole (think "web site" but not web) is just plain markdown text files in a directory listing.
@ferret It's really nice for a lot of things. Article? Plain text! Maybe a link to a relevant photo to download and look at. No ad! No cookie question! No tracker. No Facebook or X share buttons. Just text.
Most of it is just plain static text, and even the changing text is static once rendered. (My gopher hole has my PlayStation trophy counts, but it changes by something else writing a text file).
I recommend browsing in the terminal, but there are GUI gopher browsers.