gopher-plus VS nostr

Shameless plug: I recently wrote a gopher client library for Deno, just for fun. https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher

I also cleaned-up the weird formatting of the Gopher+ protocol and put it on github as a formatted markdown file since it was never and official RFC so trawling through an unstructured txt file when trying to implement the protocol was a pain: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus

Hope it is useful for someone implementing new gopher code like I was! :)

I think it is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. There are a few Gopher+ servers out there, and the Gopher+ protocol is pretty flexible and designed with the metaverse in mind originally (see GopherVR from the original authors).

It is a shame that a lot of current Gopher users seem to be strongly against anything apart from standard Gopher, when the original authors of the protocol had much grander ideas for interactivity & visual interfaces. Sigh.

For anyone interested, the Gopher+ protocol doc never made it to a proper RFC, but is on github in a hyper-linked format to make it easier to read: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus/blob/main/gop...

https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus/blob/main/gop... specifically mentions 3D representations of Gopherspace.

Other things that might be worth looking into: Nostr for comms https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr

nostr (https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr) seems to be a minimal possible solution. It doesn't seem to be much in use though, so I guess once that happens a few issues will come up.

I don’t know if this is the answer you’re looking for because it’s not tied to a cryptocurrency but take a look at nostr: https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr

It’s a protocol that allows nodes to gossip event messages amongst each other. The event relays can be used as a backend to provide data to your web/desktop/mobile apps.

Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". It is a new type of social experience on the web where "dumb" relays can be used to send messages from one user to another, in a secure, censorship resistant manner.

Created an issue about this. Please give any extra input that you think may help them create a better community out reach. The project seems cool in premise, but I agree with you. https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr/issues/46

The difficulty of hosting my own pages makes me prefer a system like Nostr[1] where the user doesn’t need any kind of account on a specific server.

I could also post markdown files over that too.

[1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr

Between inefficient and bad for privacy P2P DHTs and completely centralized or federated models from which you can be banned very easily, there exists a solution that takes the best of both worlds: https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr.

Basically it works like this:

> Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side.