+ _ _ ____ ____ ____ _ _ ____
| |\/| | | |__/ |___ |\ | |__| Web: https://morena.rest
+--+--+ | | |__| | \ |___ | \| | | Mail: morena@morena.rest
| IRC: morena.rest
+ The internet is full. Fuck Off
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2023-05-28
Morena talked to other Gopher servers
-------------------------------------
Last night, I checked around 300 live gopher servers. It was not
a deep search, just some fast discovery during one Gopher night ;/
My favorite tool for this is the original Gopher client from
the University of Minnesota. I talked to all these live servers with
this client. It was not really a delightful experience. I would say
that Gopher servers are in the same shape as anything else in this
clown world - broken.
What did I find not pleasant?
Issue 1: Non-standard item type
-------------------------------
Almost all servers use a lot of "free text" inside of a menu. They
call it informational text and define it as item type "i". However
what I experienced was not informational, but troublesome. The whole
browsing was painful, gopher's presentation looked messy and much
harder to navigate in the terminal. It was like searching for that one
unix command on a robot generated SEO crapsite between a million
of pointless words.
Not all lines of this text were displayed in the Gopher client.
I would say, that even one line of this text did not add any value.
Issue 2: Abuse of the menu
--------------------------
Some servers went so far that their text files were transformed
into the menu itself, full of that "informational text". They
practically changed the item type 0 to item type 1. It was in many
cases unreadable by the original Gopher client. Text was just out of
my screen without any way to see it.
Issue 3: Many links in the menu to external protocols
-----------------------------------------------------
Too many links outside of the Gopher. All kinds of menu items with
a link to some external protocol such as the WWW, IRC and similar.
This is notably annoying in the main menu of the Gopher server.
I can just assume these admins of servers use some clicky gopher
client which is able to open these links somehow somewhere. Maybe
some more powerful terminal clients or scripts to do it from their
Gopher client. Most probably they are just "regular respectable
fillers" of online space ;/
I don't like to leave my Gopher client while using it. If I want to
open some additional tool and check some source from it, I prefer to
copy the URI and open it myself.
Issue 4: Outdated and broken menu items
---------------------------------------
Outdated, completely useless and broken, non-working menu items were
other annoying things I found out there. The worst is probably
a broken menu item. This Gopher client can spend several wasteful
seconds to connect to some non-existent server. Don't even try to
interrupt it with CTRL+C ;/ It will freeze and you will have to kill
it, so you will lose history of your navigation.
Pretty funny are outdated sources with descriptions like "news" or
"changelog", where the last date is from the Stallin era ;/
Issue 5: Junkyard of binary and other files
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Huge "collection" of whatever somebody found in some computer.
Hundreds of binary files, pictures and Nostradamus knows what else.
There may be some useful old or new things and if these are
categorized and correctly named, it would probably be useful for some
people. To create one folder and put there everything you found in a
floppy disks from your papa's garage may be cool just for you ;/
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One can experience a shitfull time in the IRC too. If a network or
channel is filled up with bots, spammy links or people filling up your
screen with random crap or trashtalk ;/ Even non ASCII, too long or
hardly readable nicks can be pesky there.
This is everywhere, not just in the Gopher, IRC or WWW. Something is
naturally unavoidable, some issues can be mitigated, while other
problems can be completely removed with some care. It all depends on
the state of admins and their willingness to watch out for "parasites".
Some people like to call it internet chaos. That is not chaos, dear.
You will not find 10 tigers flying together with 5 crows and one shark
above the jungle. Chaos is something different.
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Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with
chaos.