As a client you have no control over this though, because you can't make people provide services using Gopher instead of HTTP.
To put it another way, for someone wanting to provide a service it's daft to choose Gopher 'because it's lightweight'. If you're providing the service, nobody can stop you providing a lightweight HTTP service and in fact doing so is mind numbingly easy. Just do it.
Or provide a URL link to an FTP server. Gopher was basically just a nicer to use menu based alternative to ftp, but visual browser ftp clients are pretty much that now anyway.
Having said all that, it is kind of cool that Gopher is still around. I was using it years before HTTP even existed. If Gopher is going to exits then yes, being lightweight is one of it's strengths, but pretending that this meaningfully distinguishes it from HTTP doesn't strike me as a very strong argument. I suspect a lot of it's attraction is techie cultural exclusivity and contrariness. Not that I have anything against those things whatsoever.
To put it another way, for someone wanting to provide a service it's daft to choose Gopher 'because it's lightweight'. If you're providing the service, nobody can stop you providing a lightweight HTTP service and in fact doing so is mind numbingly easy. Just do it.
Or provide a URL link to an FTP server. Gopher was basically just a nicer to use menu based alternative to ftp, but visual browser ftp clients are pretty much that now anyway.
Having said all that, it is kind of cool that Gopher is still around. I was using it years before HTTP even existed. If Gopher is going to exits then yes, being lightweight is one of it's strengths, but pretending that this meaningfully distinguishes it from HTTP doesn't strike me as a very strong argument. I suspect a lot of it's attraction is techie cultural exclusivity and contrariness. Not that I have anything against those things whatsoever.