gopher://umbrellacorp.io

I'm just getting it spun up and off the ground, using a fork of gophernicus I've been tinkering with.

More content to come.

the World Wide Web can kiss my ass

(from: gopher://triapul.cz/0/phlog/2024-01-28-underside.txt)

govidious was a toy, now you too can be a toy maker.

I grew comfortable enough to make something useful. the triapul.cz gopher hole now hosts lists of various privacy respecting foss front-ends in /files/underside/[1], sourced from the fantastic farside[2] project.

Instances for each service are divided up into individual txt files in the said directory. While you're welcome to manually visit every time you're looking for a front end, the idea behind creating this was to have an updated list that is easily accessible and can be incorporated into custom scripts.

For example, to get a random instance for gothub, a github front-end, try the following:

$ echo "/files/underside/gothub.txt" | nc triapul.cz 70 | sort -R | head -n1

A simple parser for replacing github links could look a little something like this (let's imagine it's called parser.sh):

#!/bin/sh
instance=$(echo "/files/underside/gothub.txt" | nc triapul.cz 70 | sort -R | head -n1 | cut -d"/" -f3)

parse() {
 echo "$1" | sed "s/github.com/$2/"
}

parse $1 $instance

Now if we run:

$ sh parser.sh https://github.com/benbusby/farside

We get back a front-ended url. It's up to you how/if you make use of this.

_technicalities:

The lists are refreshed once a day. It is entirely possible for a project to go dark and exist for a while with no known instance. In that case the file will contain "NOTHING" instead.

I think of farside as a successor to the once shining simple-web[3] project and I wanted to make sure its legacy is felt even in the gopherspace.

May this project help you navigate the web-world.

_resources:

• [1] gopher://triapul.cz/1/files/underside
• [2] https://farside.link
• [2] https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/#about
• [2] https://github.com/benbusby/farside
• [3] gopher://triapul.cz/0/phlog/2023-06-04-simple-web-memorial-service.txt

I made a small gopher service. You give it a youtube url and it returns a random invidious instance.

gopher://triapul.cz/0/phlog/2024-01-27-govidious.txt

gopher://katolaz.net/0/ed_tutorial.txt

gopher://embryonic.church

cat's latest

gopher://perma.computer

Worth a read.

Every week Wednesday 000UTC (so 19 hours from now) I do an aNONradio show about lisp and the gopher !

This week my gopher oriented topic is mainly old computer challenge final phosts,

but if you know a good gopher topic I should mention, please share it here !

Mastodon toot: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@screwtape/110733226063800243

My recent musings on Gopher-commerce. Humbly submitted to the community for discussion...

Leave the debate on plain web javascripted ethics at the door, let this thread be a collection of gopher:// urls that you personally want the cyber world to know of. Advertise yourselves.

"Shy or not, slow or fast, let it be read."

• Michel Foucalt, probably

Are you stranded with just your basic Unix toolkit? No internet browser? No gopher client? Use netcat!

echo "/directory/file" | nc domain.name port

For example:

To view tilde.institute root goohermap: echo / | nc tilde.institute 70

or to get a .txt file from: occ.deadnet.se in /users/how.txt

echo /users/how.txt | nc occ.deadnet.se 70

There are many amazing projects and alternative front-ends strewn about the gopherverse, some of which can completely eliminate the dependency on their plain-web versions.

There are also holes that provide tools unique to gopher.

Let's make this thread an on the fly database of front-ends, services and useful tools.

My main frustration with the phlogosphere is that it's not trivial to comment or discuss a phlog entry by other means that the web (which we all despise, right?)

There are solutions of course, but I find them inconvenient:

• emails
• instant messaging (IRC/matrix/...)
• /7/ item trick
• ???

What's your take on that ?

unix_surrealism mini g2