GETTING THE GOPHER
NP89 surprised me by being surprised:
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7enp89/glog/20230828-someone_doesnt_get_gopher.txt
In reference to this:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7ecardboard64/phlog/07-considering-leaving.txt
I saw that Gopher hole by Cardboard64 years ago, possibly before I
started (or put online) one of my own. I don't understand how it
was hard to maintain - I find Gopher's popular presentation
standards much easier to meet with minimal thought and effort than
the web's. But I did understand the concerns over a lack of
audience.
NP89's idea that watching readership metrics on Gopher is not
'getting it' actually echos my own conclusions here (after an
initial detour in the first section):
gopher://aussies.space/0/%7efreet/phlog/2020-02-29An_Anti-Logging_Protest.txt
------------------------------------------------------------------
So here I am on Gopher. The fact that I'm here means that I'm
jumping a new leap into obscurity. I kind-of suspect that
paradoxically the average views for pages in my Gopher hole might
be higher than for my personal website, simply beacuse there's less
content on Gopher as a whole for Gopher-lovers to look at. But
maybe that shouldn't matter. Maybe to consider that is really to
miss the point in the first place. I'm here because I like Gopher
(not least because it doesn't demand encryption), and to say things
that I want to say, knowing well that they're often not popular
opinion. Overall whether that attracts or repels people, it's what
I'm here for.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I tried to be popular on the Web, and people ran away.
Now I've got on Gopher, and I'm dug in to stay.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
------------------------------------------------------------------
I still like that little rhyme.
The difference is that I definately wasn't expecting more views or
engagement than "a mostly-text WWW", because my WWW didn't get much
of those anyway (except for selling things, which definately drives
up the email traffic but in a different way).
But the point was still that there would be some audience here.
While Aussies.space was offline I also did consider whether it was
worth publishing these things publicly. From all the
flash-in-the-pan type Gopher holes where there's a burst of initial
posts then silence, I suspect what NP89 considers "not getting
Gopher" is quite possibly the most common experience of people
starting new Gopher holes. Compared to just saving a personal
journal to file or keeping one's thought to one's self, the
indisputable extra effort of publishing content in a Gopher hole,
suspecting it to be read by nearly nobody, is pretty hard to
justify.
At the end of the day Gopher is a communication protocol. You use
it because you want to communicate publicly, and therefore people
expect it to be accessed by more than an handful of others. The
idea of a blog-like section in a gopher hole is something that NP89
has themself picked up from the Gopher community. One person
starts, which inspires another person to start, which rewards the
first person with more content to read themselves. The phlogs, or
glogs as NP89 seems to prefer to call them, are a shining success
story of community engagement on Gopher.
On the other hand I've got sections like History Snippets which I
started in my Gopher hole where I would have loved to inspire other
like-minded people to do something similar. As it is, lack of
suggestion that anyone but me is interested has certainly been the
main reason why I did away with my attempt at regular additions
there. I'd certainly be interested to read other people's
assessments of political micro-parties, even in other countries,
but there's no sign that my section on pre-election Australian
political party research/opinions has had any interest either. My
offer to accept comments there via email was never taken up.
I wasn't expecting a response to those sections as such, but had
they received one I would have considered it a success for Gopher.
It would prove that Gopher's appeal as a communication system is
still wide enough to be used by people with special interests
besides computers.
My phlog is quite possibly the most active part of my Gopher hole
because it is sort-of transactional. Even though people rarely ever
respond directly to my phlog posts, there is an idea that if I'm
reading their phlog they might be reading mine, and maybe that
inspires them to write too. If I were certain that 99% of the
people posting to Gopherspace really don't care whether I post or
not, maybe I would be less inclined to participate. Much like how I
haven't been adding pages as regularly at my website, where the
logs showed how little interest there was for content that I
thought was akin to other people's webpages which I enjoyed reading
myself.
So maybe Cardboard64 was expecting more from Gopher than it was
likely to provide, but I don't think they missed the point
entirely. This isn't something akin to a private mailing list where
we know and control the exact breadth of the audience we talk to.
We speak to the world and hope it might speak back in a similar
voice. Knowing that it isn't really listening seems like an easy
reason why someone might give up.
In my case I choose not to know. Not only did I conclude early on
that I don't care about the server logs for my Gopher hole being
inaccessible (although they certainly could be made available with
a little work by the admin to set up filters), but after I switched
to hosting my websites on a VPS instead of shared hosting I never
set up a web log analyser there. So I'm not tracking page views on
my website anymore either. I might be giving back content to
like-minded individuals, or I might be throwing all my effort away.
For fear of going the same way as Cardboard64, I prefer not to be
certain either way.
- The Free Thinker