⚠️ This post is archived from my phlog in Gopherspace. Please read my post on the Gopher Protocol to get started!
If you haven’t noticed, I am a member of Bitreich, which is one of the forerunners in not just preserving The Internet Gopher Protocol, but propelling it forward. The Gopher Protocol is a very simple barebones protocol from the early 90s which predated the web. Think of a different way of navigating information than a web browser, kinda.
Bitreich hosts a yearly conference which is held both online and in person via their very neat conferencing ecosystem. They have a “conference in gopherspace” guide where you can read more.
I had the honor of speaking at brcon2025 last Saturday, August 2nd:
I presented my in-progress documentary which covers the smallnet: from Gopher history, to smallnet present and future. Fun interviews with most of the original Gopher RFC people, like Mark P. McCahill, Bob Alberti, Paul Lindner. I also interviewed Cory Doctorow and Melon King (of MelonLand). I mentioned plans to interview the founder of Bitreich for this documentary and also that this documentary plans to bring awareness to a retro tech/video game museum which is important to me/I volunteer at: The MADE. Interestingly, I noticed I wasn’t the only one talking about museums.
Here’s my copy of the assets from the talk, although you can find the originals on the official brcon2025 archive:
If you explore the archives, you’ll see there’s actually a lot of really amazing work being done in gopherspace, with .ogg recordings and transcripts. On that note, one of my favorite things about Bitreich is its ecosystem. For example, all the presenters used a very unix-y streaming setup for audio and presenting using a tool they called catpoint (like PowerPoint, but text-based). Personally, I streamed to their server using ffmpeg–which was a lot of fun. Thankfully, for my expediency I used ChatGPT to help with exactly what command I needed to accomplish such with their Darkice server. All this lines up with a lot of my philosophy which was passed on to me from wonderful Unix boomers: don’t reinvent the wheel, these old tools, like icecast, are tried and true. Keep it simple, not monolithic. Interoperable. Let people use the tools they want.
Here are some highlights I’ve chosen from brcon2025:
- 20h’s presentation on Gopher Game Programming
- Hackathon, developing out features for
sacc, which is definitely my favorite TUI gopher client.
Hack the planet!
– someodd
Original content in gopherspace: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/1/phlog/brcon-2025.gopher.txt