I don't seem to get gopher. I've published stuff, nobody seems to come, send emails to people but it often takes week to get a response if at all. Is gopher like an old-timers club or people who "get the culture"?

2024-10-09 · 1 year ago · 👍 stack

12 Comments ↓

Gopher is the oldest of old school Internet. Traffic is going to be very slow. Don't expect much interaction on a given day or week.

To put it in perspective when I post something in Gemini, and send it to a feed like Antenna I'll get on the order of maybe a hundred views a day the first few days and then slowly drop down to maybe 5 over a week. Gopher is going to be finding your content mainly through searching and people actually crawling your site.

Gopher was created before the web, and when the web was invented, after a few years most everyone that was on Gopher switched to the web. Gopher has a much smaller community now for that reason.

It's not quite shouting into the vacuum, it's more like posting a note in tiny handwriting on the fridge of an old folks' home...

I think if you're getting responses to your emails at all it's something to be grateful for. People have busy lives, and even still they took the time to respond to some rando who sent them an email. That was a favor they did, not something they owed you.

Sending a response isn't a favor, it's the polite thing to do, especially if you are a software developer or who writes content on the internet, or even if you are in academia.

I wrote to an academic author of a Theology book, and they graciously responded to me, even though they didn't know who I was. They do it because it's polite, and because it's a way of "networking" - connecting with others within your field.

I even heard from some Linguistics academics that Noam Chomsky will literally respond to every single email he gets, because he loves it.

While I'm not saying everyone should be responded to, I am saying that it's not a favor.

Also, I know of one person within the Gopher community that is very vocal about being against the Gemini community, over at bitreich. These people do exist, and this particular person has driven people away from bitreich, from what I have been told. Some people are just non-mainstream elitists, basically. The people who think they're better than everyone because they're in a small community using outdated technology.

Well, thank you all, I hope to respond properly later in the day :)

Oh yes, @clseibod absolutely. It's just that it seems wasteful to post if nobody is interested.

I understand that

I see :(

It used to be migueldeluisespinosa.com but I closed it a couple of weeks ago

I see responses more like something we should do in order to build a meaningful framework...

@Yretek, if you are responding to a particular person, please tag them or quote a few words so it's possible to figure out what you are responding to.