On the growth and searching of Gopherspace

While cruisin' through Gopherspace today, I found a nice phlog I was not

previously aware of at:

gopher://uberspace.net:70/0/~defanor/phlog/

The author, defanor, wrote an interesting article entitled "Gophers in the

Wild"[1], describing the use of the "nmap" software (which I've heard of but am

not at all familiar with) to attempt to discover new gopherholes by trying to

connect to port 70 on randomly enumerated IPv4 addresses. I was surprised to

read that a million random hosts (literally, 1,000,000 hosts) can be scanned in

about 15 minutes! I was further surprised to learn that lots of services

• other* than Gopher are listening on port 70. This strikes me as a shame, but

there's not much that can be done about it. The conclusion seems to be that

it's quite hard to find wild gophers by blindly flinging arrows into the void.

I guess this is not surprising.

This ties in nicely with another post at twitpher[2] (thanks, psztrnk, for

helping me find that link!), which describes writing a simple Gopher spider to

follow links and get some feel for the size of gopherspace. The conclusion

there was that Gopherspace was much larger than the author expected, with almost

350 servers found overnight!

Gopherspace is in some ways small, but in other ways large. And, as a subspace,

the phlogosphere certainly feels very small and intimate.

I wonder quite a bit about the future of Gopher. It seems to be growing, but

I have no real feel for to what extent this is a real and robust trend, or just

a random fluctuation. Do we want Gopherspace to grow large? On the one hand,

there's no way for "us" (by which I guess I mean the active phlogging community)

to stop this happening if people wanted it to, and I don't see how we could

justifiably argue that it should be stopped. Gopher is not, in any sense,

• ours*. On the other hand, I worry that if if it becomes huge, some of the

magic will be lost and the community feel will disappear.

Perhaps this is silly.

If Gopherspace does grow, I wonder how we will solve the problem of finding

stuff. As defanor demonstrates, it's hard to find stuff by random searching.

Spiders and search engines can bring up more stuff than you might expect, but

they cannot find anything on new servers which nobody has linked to yet. Of

course, anybody can submit their new server to the Floodgap listing, but this is

a very centralised approach which I suspect many are philosophically opposed to,

or would be if they really thought about it. What happens if Floodgap

disappears someday? Or refuses to list servers it considers "undesirable" by

some criteria?

It's a little depressing to reflect on the fact that the corresponding solution

for the web probably is mostly just solved, in practical terms, by people

submitting their new site to Google.

[1] gopher://uberspace.net:70/0/~defanor/phlog/gophers-in-the-wild.rst

[2] gopher://uninformativ.de:70/0/twitpher/2018-01/2018-01-06.txt