For a while now I’ve been running some old school servers, very text-based things like the famous BBS, but I’ve also more recently got into running a Gopher server.

If you don’t know what Gopher is, well, you’re in for a treat :

The Gopher protocol is a communications protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

Wikipedia

I always find it hard to run a service like this, since I host my domains using CloudFlare to filter out bots and shit that cause problems. Unfortunately it also means that I block non-standard ports at the root level in the process.

But I managed to find a domain that worked out well for this – gopher.is – which is only available via the Gopher protocol, to access it you’ll need a Gopher client or a Gopher web proxy. It’s the ultimate in text-only experience and from my end, a very lightweight server to run.

Lukáš Vaňátko

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