Gophery things

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I really don't want this phlog (or, heaven forbid, the phlogosphere in

general) to become primary about gopher, but, well sometimes a whole

bunch of gophery things happen at about the same time. Non-gopher

content is coming down the pipeline, slowly.

sysdharma wrote about planning to attend Gophercon in Brazil, which is

about the Go programming language and not our beloved port 70, raising

the question of whether we want to actually try to make a real

gopher conference happen. Tomasino proposed[2] a seriously

tantalising program. I have to admit I like the idea a lot, but I'm

skeptical of it ever being pulled off. Meatspace is basically a

non-starter, as others have mentioned, because the community is small

and geographically widespread. Having something virtual would be

• less* problematic, but I still suspect timezones would make it

difficult for all interested parties to be active for more than a very

short window of time. Still, I'd love to be proven wrong and see it

happen.

zcray did some interesting exploration[3] to see how many gopher

servers are accessible via IPv6. Circumlunar.space so far is not, and

I hereby pledge to correct that in the very near future. I will also

update VF-1 to function as IPv6 supporting client. I already had a

quick look at getting Gophernicus to listen on IPv6 at

circumlunar.space, hoping it would be easy. From reading the man

pages for systemd socket activation configurations, it absolutely

• should* already be listening on IPv6 and v4, but it isn't. I'm not

sure why, and I'm more inclined to just run it from xinetd than try

to figure out why, because this will almost certainly be quicker,

easier and less rage inducing.

I wrote at tedious length yesterday[4] about text encoding support in

VF-1 and mentioned (or at least should have) that Gophernicus, by

default, will downconvert anything it serves to ASCII, and you have

to explicitly disable this in order to be able to serve, say, UTF-8

content. I was looking at the docs today as part of my IPv6 research

and noticed that rather than just turning this off, you can in fact

ask it to reencode whatever it serves into your encoding of choice.

It will apparently automatically detect and handle any on-disk

encoding. So, I'm going to configure my server to re-encode

everything as UTF-8, and I encourage other Gophernicus users to do

the same. This makes me feel nice in a Postel's law kind of way.

My server will be conservative in what it produces (UTF-8 only, no

matter what) and my client will be liberal in what it accepts

(autodetecting anything it can using chardet if installed).

There was a post to the gopher-project mailing list today announcing

a visualisation of modern gopherspace[5]. This is definitely

interesting stuff and I'm happy to see it, although I think there is

a lot of scope for improvement. I am hoping that the raw data will

end up being shared so that people in the community can do various

neat things wiht it. I am curious about the fact that SDF does not

show on the network diagram at all, and also wonder about how

accurate the geolocation behind the world map is (there are no

points in Australia, but jandal's server is in Sydney[6]).

Finally, and most sadly, Ze Libertine Gamer seems to have completely

deleted their gopherhole, replacing it with a single line of text[7]

proclaiming "I don't know what to do with myself on the Internet any

more". I have no idea what the backstory is here, and of course ZLG

is absolutely free to bow out of gopherspace if it's what they truly

want, but I'd be sad to see this happen. Every independently-hosted

gopherhole offering high quality original content is an important

part of the slowly but surely developing revival of gopher, and

there are few enough of them around that the loss of just one is

really significant. :(

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/sysdharma/phlog/./2018.04.08

[2] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180408-re-sysdharma-gophercon

[3] gopher://gopher.zcrayfish.soy:70/1/phlog/20180410-who-s-running-gopher-on-ipv6

[4] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/vf1-updates-and-tips.txt

[5] http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/Visually-Mapping-Gopherspace-in-2018

[6] gopher://tellus.strangled.net:70/0/technical-info

[7] gopher://zelibertinegamer.me:70/1