Dear fellow gophers, I have been lurking around the ML for quite a while, and finally decided to subscribe and get in the open. I started using gopher at uni in the late '90s and came back to it a couple of years ago, to find that the gopherspace is still very active and full of good stuff. And fell back in love :) I have been developing a couple of mostly-useless gopher utils in the last few months, including a server in a shell script, a validator, and a gopher fork of cgit, that I called cgit-70. You can find more info at: gopher://kalos.mine.nu and a demo of cgit-70 with some of my repos at: gopher://cgit.mine.nu Now, having a peculiar fixation with graphs and networks, I have been slowly crawling the gopherspace (only type 1 selectors) to produce a comprehensive graph and to obtain some statistics to share with the community. My intention is to do the crawl *once*, construct the graph of menus, and make it freely available (in anonymised form, i.e. sha256sums of selectors) together with some aggregated stats about its structure, e.g. about number of servers and selectors, degree distribution, typical distances between nodes, clusters, centrality distribution, etc, and maybe a couple of plots. This would give us a quantitative understanding of how the gopherspace looks like today. Then, if you think the work is worth anything, we could repeat the experiment at intervals of 6 months or more, e.g. to track the growth of the network and its evolution. Otherwise we could just live with what we got. So far, I have retrieved ~18K menus from ~300 active servers, which point to ~600K selectors from 740 servers (but still don't know how many of those are active). I don't crawl onion servers. Thanks a lot for all the work you do every day to keep gopher alive, and thanks in advance for the feedback, comments, critics, and suggestions that you would like to provide. I'll be around ;) KatolaZ -- [ ~.,_ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ "+. katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it ] [ @) http://kalos.mine.nu --- Devuan GNU + Linux User ] [ @@) http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia -- GPG: 0B5F062F ] [ (@@@) Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ ]
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