Gopherspace has one endemic disease: holes die. The hobby box behind your favourite phlog loses power, a domain lapses, a university closes an account, and fifteen years of writing are gone. RFC 1436 has no notion of an author, so nothing in the protocol survives the hostname. Even while a hole is up, nothing in the wire format can prove who wrote what. gopherkind moves the hole off the box. A document is a signed Nostr event, kind 31436, named for the RFC. It lives on whichever relays its author chose. Any bridge that can retrieve a copy serves it to any gopher client written since 1991. What that changes: The hole belongs to an npub, not a hostname. Lose the machine and another bridge serves the same signed events. That removes one point of failure; it does not promise relays keep events forever, and this project will not pretend otherwise. Every document proves its author. A signature travels with the text, so a copy served by a stranger is still verifiably yours. Editing is replacement, not a new address. The path is the event's d tag, so revising a page keeps every link alive. No bridge is load-bearing, including this one. The command line client reads relays directly, so a hole is readable with no bridge at all, and standing one up is a single command if you want a door on the web. Every bridge announces itself to Nostr clients on its own key, so no operator's list is the list. Every npub is already a hole. Profile, notes, long-form articles, follows and followers render as menus and text with nothing published at all. Gopherspace quietly grows by the whole Nostr userbase, and taking over your own hole is just publishing. The trade runs both ways. Nostr clients are timelines built for the scroll, and long writing is buried an hour after it is posted. Gopher is the opposite temperament: a reading room, where structure is mandatory and nothing on the page is competing for your attention. No trackers, no fonts, no cookie banner, no layout shift. Text, menus, and whatever renders them: lynx, VF-1, Lagrange, a terminal, an Amiga. Cameron Kaiser wrote that gopher divorces interface from information, and that gopher and the web should coexist. Add Nostr and all three read the same documents, while the writing outlives the box it was typed on. You are reading this over the web. The same document is served on all four. That is the argument. Start here
gopherkind.com, a public bridge on the web
Run your own bridge, and announce it to Nostr clients
Keeping it alive gopherkind is unfunded work: no company, no token, no ads, no custody of anyone's key, and nothing to sell you. It is paid for in evenings. If it earns a place in your week, the cheapest way to keep it going is to fund an evening of it. Zap: npub1mgvlrnf5hm9yf0n5mf9nqmvarhvxkc6remu5ec3vf8r0txqkuk7su0e7q2