My recent musings on Gopher-commerce. Humbly submitted to the community for discussion…

  • screwtape@lemmy.sdf.orgM
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    1 year ago

    You’ve actually convinced me that this was at least a reasonable idea but I don’t think a gopherhole shop rating system would be in theme with the closely knit community dynamic we have.

    The protocol was going to have a feature-rich, shopping-friendly set of extensions, but when this was proposed in 1993, there was a community backlash against commercialising the gopher; read Albert Rosetti’s booklet about what happened. This is roughly how the gopher protocol became both liberated and hyperstable in the early 90s.

    Imagine if a gopher wanted to sell or otherwise pass on some old computer hardware. It makes sense to share that on their gopherhole: And since payment handling is ~ always legally middle-manned by a payment handler who will handle the payment anyway, the protocol wouldn’t need to be extended to be a payment processer.

    On the other hand, I would be against paving paradise to put up a parking lot.