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vaporup | on: Why Gopher in 2026?
- https://geminiprotocol.net

- https://reticulum.network

GuB-42 | parent | next
Gemini is essentially GopherS, Reticulum doesn't seem to operate at the same level (it is L3, like IP, from the look of it).

I hold the controversial opinion that encryption can be an anti-feature on the "small web". One of the reason is technical: encryption takes computing resources, and can hardly be made time proof, as it has to evolve in response to threats, and certificates tend to have expiration dates. The other is more philosophical: you use encryption when you want to share secrets: personal data, passwords, credit card numbers, etc... A system that doesn't support encryption doesn't support transfer of personal data, accounts or commercial transactions, which I believe is a good thing in this niche. There is no shortage of secure communication systems when you need one, let that niche stay a niche.

Panda_ | root | parent
RNS doesn't really map to the OSI model very well. It takes up basically every layer, 2-6, although it does depend on how it's used. The image on https://linuxinabit.codeberg.page/blog/reticulum/ quite near the top explains the difference between Reticulum and, as an example, TCP fairly well.

Your point about not having encryption is really quite interesting to me. I would want to add some form of signing to prove something came from somewhere unaltered, but that would go against the idea.

anthk | parent | next
Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less, do yourself a favour. Run

    unset LESSOPEN
or have it at ~/.profile.

Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.

On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.

As a start, there's:

     gopher://magical.fish
     gopher://sdf.org
For gemini,

     gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.
'Lagrange' covers both gemini and gopher as a client.

You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.

Just set

     stargate.gemi.dev:1994
As the HTTP proxy in the settings for Lagrange.

For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.

nullwarp | root | parent | next
There is a go port of reticulum which I've used with success https://github.com/Quad4-Software/Reticulum-Go

There are also a few variants of Rust ports too (i like https://github.com/zevaryx/rettui for a full nomadnet replacement)

billyhoffman | root | parent
I run gemi.dev, so it was nice to see it here.

I recently built a Gemini client for people who like GUI's more than TUI's, and want a native macOS app

https://github.com/acidus99/MajorTom

vconnor | parent
Time to stop posting about these, there’s no rush for them to have their Eternal September moment. Let us enjoy the good vibes for a while longer.
vaylian | root | parent
What would an eternal September look like for Gemini? I don't think it's possible, because it's a protocol for putting basic documents online.