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   Down into the gopherhole
   June 12th, 2022
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  One of the main reasons that made me decide to delve deeper into the 
  slow/small Internet philosophies is social, rather than technical.
  
  While studying participative systems during my PhD, I learned about
  communities of practice and how bonds are created not just by sharing
  the same activities, but also common language and tools. And in the
  case of gopher, as well as gemini, focusing on a common activity based
  on information sharing, while at the same time relying on a set of
  tools which are purposely constrained, serves a greater purpose than
  the one these tools were built for. To quote meff, a Usenet user
  posting on comp.infosystems.gopher on May, 20th 2022:

  "That said Gopher is fun. Hanging out on the net is fun. The web these
   days is just where the "normies" from my school days hang out. I
   didn't have much fun with them as a kid and I'm not having a lot of
   fun with them now as an adult. Humans have always formed groups in any
   space they socialize and I don't think the net is any different."

  The idea of joining groups of like-minded people is always present in
  different small Internet communities, no matter whether they are pubnix
  systems, gopher blogs, or usenet groups. And, as stated in the Small
  Internet Manifesto [1], these groups should be preferably small and
  cohese (one of the points that large modern social networks often tend
  to ignore, or do not facilitate enough).

  For these reasons, it did not take me too much time to fall deep into
  the gopherhole (but you might have already understood it has not been 
  just gopher!), with the same enthusiasm of an ethologist preparing for
  a new research. I had been reading from sparse phlogs in a very random
  way until recently, but when I decided to delve deeper into the topic I
  realised there was way more material than I thought, both in terms of
  resources (text files, but also tools and services) and communities.

  Gopher itself has roughly doubled in size in the last 10 years, at
  least for what concerns the number of servers (160 in 2012, 336 in
  June 2022 [2]). New pubnix servers have been created, and old ones
  such as SDF grew both in size and userbase. Usenet groups talk about
  the resurgence of older systems and technologies. Mastodon (also due
  to Elon Musk's attempt at acquiring Twitter) saw the number of toots
  per week double in one month.

  I have been reading a lot, taking notes, and experimenting with new
  stuff. But most of all, I am seeing something I like, and with a pace
  that is more compatible with my current life. I would like to document
  it here, but I will also try to make it as simple as possible for me,
  so expect something raw and without a regular cadence. And if for some
  reason there is something you like and want to talk about, feel free
  to drop me an email at mala@sdf.org.


[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt  
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)