Gopherhole: Redux 2019 2019-02-21 I've been happily noodling around the interstices of the web of late. I'm still super happy with my nanoreader[1] and using it everyday has reminded me of the beauty of plaintext. Text _is_ content. In that spirit, I've gone back to using gopher. I've **finally** got what I missed when I wrote about this three years ago[2] - text doesn't need to be the web! Text can just be itself, text _should_ just be itself. My previous effort missed this fundamental principle, and looking back now, I can see that this was largely to blame for my walking away from that experiment. Coming back to the idea of gopher, with that in mind, has been **liberating**. Some of my content (not my microposts) is available on gopher[3], as this post will be. I've been doing this for a few weeks now, feeling my way into an area I once knew well, and I'm satisfied with the results. I'd love to hear from anyone else who's using gopher, or who's using older text-focused network systems in interesting ways. I still want to love the web. I still want to find communities working to deliver on the promise there once was in this technology. References________________________________________________ [1] https://ringdown.ascraeus.org/dgold/nanoreader [2] https://ascraeus.org/running-down-a-gopherhole/ [3] gopher://ascraeus.org +++ENDS+++