Ramin HonaryOn the #LispyGopherClimate podcast today, me, @screwlisp and @kentpitman had a fascinating conversation with @someodd .
During our conversation I remember her dropping this idea that the #GopherProtocol was all about menus. I remember this because she had said something like it in her Bartleby RFC document which I had read earlier, “But gopher is hierarchical. That’s the whole point. It’s a tree of menus, not a stream of content.” (I copy-pasted the section from which that quote comes below).
Just two weeks prior on the #LispyGopherClimate podcast we had a discussion with @chiply about “incremental completing read,” which was directly related to @karthink ‘s blog post on the Emacs Avy package.
So here is my crazy synthesis of the two: Emacs Avy as a Gopher client!!!
The incremental completing read pattern goes “Filter a list of results -> Select an item -> perform an action on the item.” The action could be to read the page, or to open a link that may trigger an “applet” action. I can see a whole new way to browse the Internet: no search engines, no LLM chat, just type what you think may exist and narrow down the list of all the content until you find something that you might want to read!
Is this post an attempt at humor, or am I just rambling? A little of each. I do want to try to build this thing, if anything to see how funny it would be to try to browse the Gopher network that way.
(Quoting @someodd )
I’ve been thinking a lot about how people in gopherspace – myself included – try too hard to make gopher be like the web. We abuse directories so we can have files with links. We call our writing “phlogs” which is just “blog” with a different letter, and then our phlogs end up looking like imitations of blogs anyway. Reverse chronological. Post after post. A timeline.
But gopher is hierarchical. That’s the whole point. It’s a tree of menus, not a stream of content. And the biggest abuse of gopher I see is people trying to flatten that hierarchy, trying to make it not-hierarchical, because that’s what the web trained us to expect.
So I started asking: what would sharing information look like if gopher had won? If the web never happened and something other than blogs took off? You wouldn’t have “posts.” You’d have a library. Subjects on shelves. You’d browse by walking through the stacks, not by scrolling a timeline.
That’s what bartleby is trying to be. Not a blog engine that speaks gopher, but a tool that takes the hierarchy seriously. Collections are the primary axis, not dates. Recent acquisitions exist, but they’re the display by the door, not the organizing principle.
Kent Pitman
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)