Visiting Gopher Space with WSGopher

Written By @levelsio

Last updated About 2 months ago

Gopher is the actual predecessor to the modern WWW, no modern browser supports it anymore

But Netscape does, and there's actually a whole world out there of people still actively using it.

There's live chats, people made gateways to Reddit, and you can the live weather

Around ~1990, Gopher and HTTP were competing who would be the protocol of the web, HTTP won because of its freedom: you could design any interface in HTML without the restrictions of the Gopher menu-based system

And then in 1993 the University of Minnesota (who invented Gopher) really killed it when they started charging licensing fees to whoever used it

In an alternative universe HTTP wouldn't have won and we'd all still be on Gopher, but now there's 8 billion people on HTTP and about 1000 on Gopher :D

It's kinda like the dark web, but in a more happy way, it's this cosy underground part of the web, that takes a shitload of effort to even access, and that makes it more cool and fun and cosy

Gopher sites are called Gopherholes.

Make sure to first open WSGopher on pieter.com and then enter one of the addresses below (or use the Bookmarks feature where they’re already inside of):

And then: