30th of April 2026, Thursday

Hello Gophers!

I't been some time since I wrote something, so I thought I would try to put
some thoughts to file again. I have recently seen some discussion floating 
around Geminispace about the wish to have less technical posts in the Gopher
and Gemini spaces. One of the answers was that people who discover the exis-
tence of Gopher/Gemini are very often tech savvy people, so it is quite natu-
ral that these people post more techy stuff.

But on the other hand, I can see what the people want when they ask for these
less techy posts. If there were more non-tech posts, the spaces would be more
interesting for not-so-techy people, which in turn could lead to a nice growth
path for both areas. But I think there is another issue that we have here, and
that is that many 'normal' people (what is exactly normal?) think that the
term 'Internet' is fully equivalent to 'World Wide Web'. I have had to explain
so many times to non-tech people that the Internet is so much more than only 
that. It seems that most people that I try to explain this to, have a hard time
getting their heads around this. They do not understand the idea of ports, al-
though most people understand IP adresses (which is odd IMHO). 

If and when these people finally understand there are many more ports and
protocols than only http/https, they still have a hard time to actually open
up this box of new possibilities. In other words: There is a clear entry barrier
to other protocols like Gopher and Gemini, and it is higher than you would 
imagine. The question then arises: 'How can we make this barrier lower?', and I
do not have a good answer to that. It is relatively easy to install Lagrange for
example, but the growth still seems slow.

Does anyone of you have an idea about this? Drop me a line, or write a follow-
up post if you feel inclined to do so.

For now, enjoy your spring (for those in the Northern Hemisphere that is)!


Cheers,

Fripster

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