(from: gopher://triapul.cz/0/phlog/2024-01-28-underside.txt)
govidious was a toy, now you too can be a toy maker.
I grew comfortable enough to make something useful. the triapul.cz gopher hole now hosts lists of various privacy respecting foss front-ends in /files/underside/[1], sourced from the fantastic farside[2] project.
Instances for each service are divided up into individual txt files in the said directory. While you're welcome to manually visit every time you're looking for a front end, the idea behind creating this was to have an updated list that is easily accessible and can be incorporated into custom scripts.
For example, to get a random instance for gothub, a github front-end, try the following:
$ echo "/files/underside/gothub.txt" | nc triapul.cz 70 | sort -R | head -n1
A simple parser for replacing github links could look a little something like this (let's imagine it's called parser.sh):
#!/bin/sh
instance=$(echo "/files/underside/gothub.txt" | nc triapul.cz 70 | sort -R | head -n1 | cut -d"/" -f3)
parse() {
echo "$1" | sed "s/github.com/$2/"
}
parse $1 $instance
Now if we run:
$ sh parser.sh https://github.com/benbusby/farside
We get back a front-ended url. It's up to you how/if you make use of this.
_technicalities:
The lists are refreshed once a day. It is entirely possible for a project to go dark and exist for a while with no known instance. In that case the file will contain "NOTHING" instead.
I think of farside as a successor to the once shining simple-web[3] project and I wanted to make sure its legacy is felt even in the gopherspace.
May this project help you navigate the web-world.
_resources:
- [1] gopher://triapul.cz/1/files/underside
- [2] https://farside.link/
- [2] https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/#about
- [2] https://github.com/benbusby/farside
- [3] gopher://triapul.cz/0/phlog/2023-06-04-simple-web-memorial-service.txt