Gopher-First Feeds
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Thu Nov 25 00:05:30 EST 2021

The original reason for this post was to follow up on
my previous post, "Adding a Feed for the Phlog" [1], in
which I discussed the decision to keep the Atom feed
itself only available on gopher (at the risk of limiting
the number of clients that can read it). I wanted to
broadcast that I've settled on sfeed(1) and sfeed_curses(1)
as a feed reader with gopher support (due to using
curl(1) as the default fetcher, which supports gopher).

As I wrote this though, I realized I observed something
more interesting to discuss about feeds--just like
gopher specifies the menu format as part of the protocol
(and thus makes all user interaction the same between
gopherholes), feed readers are able to present a
universal interface to many different blogs, which
is so cool. I know some people put a lot of effort into
their styling, but it's really enjoyable to read the
sfeed_content(1) dumps of the articles all from the
same client. Just like I know exactly what to expect
when I visit a gopherhole, each new feed item is
familiar in its presentation.

Maybe it's just me, but there's a bit of comfort in
browsing without surprises.

[1]: gopher://alexkarle.com/0/phlog/010.txt