Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?
I got really tired, as a human, of parsing the standard marketing heavy web we have today.
I’ve always loved the simplicity of gopher and gemini web.

Recently I found myself manually adding `/llm.txt` to most websites I visit because I find the content for LLMs strait to the point and clear.
The only annoyance is web browsers like chrome do not render the markdown.

So could the AI revolution actually fix the web for humans as a side effect? … ⌘ Read more

Maybe I’m just used to the text-only ecosystems of Gopher and Gemini by now, but even Nostr feels too noisy for me.

Python’s Stamina for Go: Bringing Ergonomic Resilience to Gophers
1 points posted by cinar ⌘ Read more

Am I talking to the void?

Despite the driving force behind me being here lying in the curiosity and challenge of “let’s check out this new thing and see what it takes to bring get it working”, I’d like to know if there are other people reading me. Or if it’s just like on my gopher site, where around 96% of the visits are from bots.

I mean, it’s still fun to tinker with tech tools for the mere sake of it, but at times I can’t help but feel like Prometheus and Sisyphus at the same time.

Not that I’d stop. Just like my “self-sufficient” sense of humor (read this with a good hint of self-deprecation and irony), most of my electronic exploratory endeavors end up being more about the process than the result.

Or, in other words: I was so focused on building this vessel that I never stopped to think where I want to go!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am genuinely curious as to why you think Geminis summarization and the categorization of your gopher post was and is as you say misunderstood?

I asked this very genuinely because before reading @bender@twtxt.net’s comments and Gemini summarization I actually went and unplugged your post into flood gaps go for proxy, and then listen to the text intently with my own human ears 👂

What is this about? I don’t run my Gopher proxy anymore 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de using gopher also limits tenth fold the amount of bystanders you will get. I think a finger .plan would probably have a bigger audience. :-D :-P

For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender@twtxt.net’s opinion):

curl -s gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-11/2025-11-05--my-current-reasons-against-ai.txt

Hmm: gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-08/2025-08-18--permacomputing.txt

That’s fairly recent, but fully justified. I give up! :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Haha, every time I read the word “Gophers”, I have to stop and remind myself that this is about Golang. 🤪)

I should have checked the CHANGELOG first. LOL.

Fellow Gophers might find this interesting, too: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/what-the-go-proxy-has-been-doing

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2018/2018-06/2018-06-01.txt

Is the first non-justified, and it is when you started using Markdown. The last justified one was:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2018/2018-05/2018-05-27.txt

So, I might have found the mystery! :-D

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net The address is/was correct but probably got mangled by the Markdown renderer. Let’s try again in a code block:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch.txt

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, the acronym is funny. 😅

Wandering through the woods for 8km … gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03–roophloch.txt

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

@dce@hashnix.club I switched over to following you on Gopher, because why not. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net curl -s gopher://… does that for you.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

What’s Missing from “Retro”: gopher://midnight.pub/0/posts/2679

Really, it won’t be long until I give the world the finger and move everything behind Gopher or Gemini. It’ll be a while until the bots find me there.

Spare a thought for this gopher gopher://sdf.org/1/users/xiled/phlog/2025/20250710_occupied

Go 開發實時推送太難？試試 Sponge SSE，一鍵搞定！
各位 Gopher 們！你們是否曾遇到過這樣的場景：• 你正在開發一個後臺監控系統，想讓 CPU 使用率、內存佔用這些數據實時展現在前端，但只能讓前端小哥每隔幾秒就發一次請求，把服務器累得夠嗆？ • 你想做一個類似微博、Twitter 的信息流，當有新消息時，能立刻 “叮” 一下推送到用戶頁面上，而不是等用戶抓耳撓腮地手動刷新？ • 或者，你只是想簡單地通知用戶：“您的外賣已由【帥哥張 ⌘ Read more

Go 開發實時推送太難？試試 Sponge SSE，一鍵搞定！
各位 Gopher 們！你們是否曾遇到過這樣的場景：• 你正在開發一個後臺監控系統，想讓 CPU 使用率、內存佔用這些數據實時展現在前端，但只能讓前端小哥每隔幾秒就發一次請求，把服務器累得夠嗆？ • 你想做一個類似微博、Twitter 的信息流，當有新消息時，能立刻 “叮” 一下推送到用戶頁面上，而不是等用戶抓耳撓腮地手動刷新？ • 或者，你只是想簡單地通知用戶：“您的外賣已由【帥哥張 ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, well, it’s a bit like twtxt. There is a Gopher community, but it’s small. I actually don’t like that HTTP is so easily accessible. I don’t like it that much when people post links to my site on HackerNews or something like that. Too much exposure.

Gopher is a small world. It’s slow and cozy.

And much like twtxt, the protocol is simple®, so it’s easier to tinker with it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de why Gopher to babble, and not just HTTP? I mean, may as well just write plain text files on your machine, and leave them there, right?

Gopher and Mastodon are two completely different things. That’s where my confusion comes from.

@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de how does Gopher relates to Mastodon? Are you getting off the Fedi completely?

Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

gopher://uninformativ.de

(No, I won’t do multi-protocol twtxt again. 😅)

When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

@prologic@twtxt.net OH SHIT using this for a protocol like gopher is smart! might have to try that for gemini so i don’t have to keep a port open for that

@bender@twtxt.net Sure! 👍

{
    ...
   # Layer 4 Reverse Proxy
   layer4 {
      # Gopher
      0.0.0.0:70 {
         route {
            proxy <internal_ip>:70
         }
      }

      # IRC (TLS)
      0.0.0.0:6697 {
         route {
            proxy <internal_ip>:6697
         }
      }
   }
}

**(#zhlsx2q) @bender@bender Sure! 👍

{
    ...
   # Layer 4 Reverse Proxy
   layer4 {
      # Gopher
      0.0.0.0:70 {
         route { ...**
[@bender _@twtxt.net_](https://twtxt.net/user/bender/) Sure! 👍

{

...

# Layer 4 Reverse Proxy
layer4 {

  # Gopher
  0.0.0.0:70 {
     route {
        proxy <internal_ip>:70
     }
  }

  # IRC (TLS)
  0.0.0.0:6697 {
     route {
        proxy <internal_ip>:6697
     }
  }

}
}

⌘ [Read more](https://twtxt.net/twt/stxbcda)

Haiku gets new malloc implementation, removes Gopher support from its browser
We’ve got the Haiku activity report covering February, and aside from the usual slew of bug fixes and minor improvements, there’s one massive improvement that deserves attention. waddlesplash continued his ongoing memory management improvements, fixes, and cleanups, implementing more cases of resizing (expanding/shrinking) memory areas when there’s a virtual memory reservation a … ⌘ Read more

**Bloody hell 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

$ jq -r --arg host "gopher.mills.io" '. | select(.request.host==$host) | "\(.request.client_ip) \(.re ...**
Bloody hell 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

$ jq -r –arg host “gopher.mills.io” ‘. | select(.request.host==$host) | “(.request.client_ip) (.request.uri) (.request.headers[“User-Agent”])“’ mills.io.log-au | while IFS=$’ ‘ read -r ip uri ua; do asn=”$(geoip -a “$ip”)“; echo “$asn $ip $uri $ua”; done | grep -E ‘^45102.*’ | sort | head
45102 47.251.70.245 /gopher.floodgap.com/0/feeds/democracynow/2015/Oct/14/0 [“Mozilla/5.0 (M … ⌘ Read more

**(#xbiyfxq) * 185325d - (HEAD -> master) edge: Ban Alibaba (38 seconds ago) <James Mills>

fark me 🤦‍♂️ Alibaba, CN has been hitting m …**
* 185325d - (HEAD -> master) edge: Ban Alibaba (38 seconds ago) <James Mills>

fark me 🤦‍♂️ Alibaba, CN has been hitting my Gopher proxy quite hard as well. Fuck’n hell! 🔥 ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Broke on me for having alt-urls I think 🥲

twtxt---profile-layout: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p, ("https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt" "gemini://box.aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt" "gopher://box.aelaraji.com/0/twtxt.txt")

**EdgeGuard Update:

I am now in a position where I’m no longer having any ports open on my firewall at the Mills DC. 🥳 All services (Gophe …**
EdgeGuard Update:

I am now in a position where I’m no longer having any ports open on my firewall at the Mills DC. 🥳 All services (Gopher, SMTP, IRC, SSH, HTTP) are being proxied through my edge network 💪 ⌘ Read more

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

Simplified twtxt - I want to suggest some dogmas or commandments for twtxt, from where we can work our way back to how to implement different feature like replies/treads:

1. It’s a text file, so you must be able to write it by hand (ie. no app logic) and read by eye. If you edit a post you change the content not the timestamp. Otherwise it will be considered a new post.

2. The order of lines in a twtxt.txt must not hold any significant. The file is a container and each line an atomic piece of information. You should be able to run sort on a twtxt.txt and it should still work.

3. Transport protocol should not matter, as long as the file served is the same. Http and https are preferred, so it is suggested that feed served via Gopher or Gemini also provide http(s).

4. Do we need more commandments?

I was not suggesting to that everyone need to setup a working webfinger endpoint, but that we take the format of nick+(sub)domain as base for generating the hashed together with the message date and content.

If we omit the protocol prefix from the way we do things now will that not solve most of the problems? In the case of gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt they also have a working twtxt.txt at https://ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt … damn I just notice the gemini. subdomain.

Okay what about defining a prefers protocol as part of the hash schema? so 1: https , 2: http 3: gemini 4: gopher ?

Genkit：新一代基於 Go 的 AI 應用開發框架
Google 推出了 Genkit for Go，這是一個開源框架，用來以 Go 語言原生構建 AI 應用與雲服務。該項目是 Google Firebase 和 Go 團隊聯手合作的最新成果。Genkit for Go 於 7 月 17 日正式推出，目前版本處於 alpha 階段。Gophers 能夠通過它將 Go 的性能和併發優勢與 Genkit 的庫和工具相結合，從而來構建生成式 AI 應用程 ⌘ Read more

通過實例理解 Go 訪問和操作數據庫的幾種方式
關係數據庫操作是 Go 應用開發中的重要一環，尤其是 Go Web 應用、微服務等。作爲 Gopher，我們需要了解幾種主流的數據庫訪問和操作方法，以便在項目中做出適當的選擇。我個人在日常開發中較少涉及 CRUD 類應用，因此使用 Go 訪問和操作數據庫的機會並不多，在這方面也算是有一些 “短板”。通過在這篇文章中對數據庫訪問方式進行全面的梳理，我也算是補全一下技能樹，同時也能爲讀者小夥伴提供一些 ⌘ Read more

It’s a shame that so many public Wi-Fi networks block traffic on ports 70 and 1965, completely cutting off both Gopher and Gemini. Restricting Internet access to only the “most common” use cases like YouTube and Wikipedia is a great way to ensure they eventually become the “only” use cases.

I would say gopher has a decade left

More specifically a gopher based zine www.mmn.ca/malware

I suspect that people who came to Gemini from Gopher are more satisfied with the protocol than people who came to Gemini from HTTP.

golang 開發: goroutine 在項目中的使用姿勢
很多初級的 Gopher 在學習了 goroutine 之後，在項目中其實使用率不高，尤其一些跨語言過來的人，對併發編程理解不深入，可能很多人只知道 go func(), 或者掌控不夠，謹慎一些，儘量少使用或者不使用，用的話就是 go func()，主要列一下我們這邊的主要使用方法。goroutine 在項目中的使用方法看一下樣例代碼，實際上，我們生產環境中就是這麼使用的。package lo ⌘ Read more

Sensory Safari at Central Florida Zoo: A sneak peek
The Central Florida Zoo & Botanical Gardens joins Good Day Orlando Xtra to introduce us to Willy, a gopher tortoise, as well as talk about their upcoming Sensory Safari event, which is geared towards children, ages 5-12. It features hands-on learning and interactive experiences. ⌘ Read more