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underside - foss front-ends in the gopherverse

(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:

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