Why Gopher in 2026?(gopher.muffinlabs.com)
47 pointsby andsoitis5 hours ago6 comments
  • prologic5 hours ago
    I still think Gopher (the protocol that is) is still very relevant today. The beauty of it really is in its simplicity. Great to see that the library I wrote all those years ago is still being used :D

    https://pkg.go.dev/git.mills.io/prologic/go-gopher

  • rektlessness17 minutes ago
    Proud exSDF member from the old days. SDF was considered 'vintage' back when i joined so must be doubly so now. Was introduced to Gopher back then too, along with NetBSD.

    What a blast from the past to see SDF.org make it to HN in 2026. Proud grandpa. lol.

  • II2II4 hours ago
    I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.
    • post-itan hour ago
      I feel the same about Gander (the Canadian Bluesky-compatible startup). The only content on it is people talking about how it's not Twitter. One of my top three beefs with it.
    • warkdarrior4 hours ago
      Maybe they are passionate about themselves??
    • anthk3 hours ago
      gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.
    • hujun2362 hours ago
      The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?
  • ecliptikan hour ago
    Few months ago I had Claude build me a Gopher browser for Classic Macintosh systems, geomys[1]. I was using TurboGopher[2] before then, and it worked, but had a lot of design choices that are clunky today.

    I tried to focus on keeping with the Apple HIG from the 1990s, while also making it more aligned with modern browser principles.

    1. https://github.com/ecliptik/geomys

    2. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/265-turbogopher

  • vaporup5 hours ago
    - https://geminiprotocol.net

    - https://reticulum.network

    • anthk5 hours ago
      Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less, do yourself a favour. Run

          unset LESSOPEN
      or have it at ~/.profile.

      Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.

      On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.

      As a start, there's:

           gopher://magical.fish
     gopher://sdf.org
      For gemini,

           gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.
      'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.

      You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.

      Just set

           stargate.gemi.dev:1994
      As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.

      For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.

  • jmclnx4 hours ago
    Why ? It is not owned and controlled by billionaires. Plus no AI slop being spammed to gopher sites.

    FWIW, the same applies to gemini protocol.

    • cowlevel3 hours ago
      Same applies to HTTP too though