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       Thread[.post]: 36.7
       TACKER:  cross (Dan Cross)
       SUBJECT: .. How you were using the Internet in the 90's?
       DATE:    25-Jan-22 15:31:13
       HOST:    sverige
       
       > cross - I think your perspective is quite congruent to mine.  I suspect
       > there is an option (c) which is pushing some of the interest in gopher and
       > the smollnet movements: To be off the regular search engine path.
       
       That may well be, but I suspect that's a bit of a
       misunderstanding of how HTTP works.  In particular, search
       engines generally pay attention to robots.txt, which can be used
       to disallow their crawlers, effectively removing those sites
       from the various search corpora.  If there is concern that a
       search engine will ignore robots.txt, then I submit that nothing
       stops someone from writing a gopher crawler and indexing what it
       finds into an ersatz search engine.
       
       Nevermind that removing oneself from the major search corpora
       limits discoverability and thus engagement.  If the goal is a
       record shop that only the cool kids know about, then I guess
       that's fine, but if one wants to build a vibrant community, then
       it seems useless.
       
       > [snip]
       > And because it is by definition a cookie-less protocol is simply CANNOT
       > track you site to site the way HTTP/HTML allows.  So some real privacy gain
       > there.
       
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       Is that actually true?  I totally believe you, but it seems like
       it discards the baby of utility with the bathwater of all
       cookies (which can be used to implement interactive
       session-style interactions with web pages).
       
       But again, I feel like this belief is based on a bit of a
       misunderstanding of how the web works.  A "cookie" is just an
       HTTP header; nothing _requires_ that either a light-weight web
       server sets cookie headers, nor that text-based browsers accept
       them.  Put another way, the HTTP protocol gives a mechanism for
       using cookies, but nothing in HTTP inherently _requires_ that
       they be used.
       
       As I mentioned earlier, participating in the Gopher space
       requires running a gopher server; there's no reason that one
       could not run an HTTP server that just doesn't traffic in
       cookies.  Similarly, for a cookie to be useful, it must be used
       by the client: Lynx, in particular, seems to always ask me
       whenever a server tries to set a cookie, and nothing prevents
       me from just saying "no".
       
       HTTP ETags are a little harder to work around, but if users
       aren't logging in when participating in my hyptothetical
       text-based web gopher replacement, it's not clear to me that an
       ETag would have much use for tracking.
       
       > I wonder what "kids" will reflect on as the golden-age internet aspect of
       
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       whenever a server tries to set a cookie, and nothing prevents
       me from just saying "no".
       
       HTTP ETags are a little harder to work around, but if users
       aren't logging in when participating in my hyptothetical
       text-based web gopher replacement, it's not clear to me that an
       ETag would have much use for tracking.
       
       > I wonder what "kids" will reflect on as the golden-age internet aspect of
       > the here and now.  Discord channels?  I don't think.  Actually... I
       > suspect it is sandbox games.  They will pine for the Minecraft worlds and
       > communities that they built.  For the sweet happy utopia of their Animal
       > Crossing islands and tight friend groups that assembled there.  And it will
       > still mostly be with people that they knew IRL that cemented their bonds in
       > these virtual spaces.
       > 
       > Some of my closest friends I still have are from the BBS days.  But there
       > was something beyond that made us bond:  Music.  We came there to connect
       > about that.  But found that our love of music AND computers made for extra
       > tight comradery.
       
       That's an interesting question.  I have fond memories of telnet,
       talk, and VMS phone.  Even using a 3270 terminal to access a
       mainframe to some extent.  The early wide-scale information
       systems including gopher and the early web were less interesting
       and a friend of mine once referred to IRC as, "the CB radio of
       the Internet."  I never _really_ got into IRC either.  :-)
       
       
       
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