[gopher] History and future of "the gopher project"

[kaltheat at googlemail.com]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 12:17:46PM -0800, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> > Today we could say that there already is such a central place where many
> > gopherians link to and which creator many gopherians take as an authority -
> > and this is floodgap and you. (Let me be clear: I hadn't this idea before
> > [when I wrote my first mail]
> > and I didn't have the purpose to bring down an emperor ...)
> 
> I don't see myself as an "emperor" of anything -- although I end up being
> in the vanguard because most of the extant client software currently in use
> was either partially or mostly written by me, and of course V-2, most
> actual *servers* nowadays seem to use Gophernicus. So there are other
> authoritiative sources, but to your specific point:
> 
> > One fact strengthens
> > this appearance: gopherproject.org directly redirects to floodgap ...
> > And this central place is not in the hand of the community and it does not
> > provide content for the complete community (for instance weather reports are
> > interresting for people being located next to you) and it strongly relies on a
> > single person - on your goodwill, on your motivation, on your spare time, on
> > your opportunity(maybe wrong word) to constantly run and maintain servers ...
> 
> gopherproject.org points to me as a historical footnote. John Goerzen
> created it as an alias to quux, but decided not to renew it and offered it
> to me, which I accepted to keep it valid.
> 
> I certainly don't mind relinquishing it, since it serves no other special
> purpose, but because it does have some significance, I intend to be somewhat
> choosy about whom or what I release it to.

Just to be clear: I didn't want to accuse anybody. And the above was just a
marginal note to those having "fear" of "authority"/"centralization"/...:
Firstly my idea wouldn't impair decentralization (as you can read in my reply
to Mateusz) and secondly there is more than no centralization/authority in
today's gopherspace than people might think ...

Regards,
kaltheat